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Microsoft to set up cloud research center in Taiwan (Reuters)Reuters - Microsoft Corp. and Taiwan's economics ministry said they plan to set up a research center on the island by next year, in the software company's first Asian foray into the budding cloud computing industry.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 4 Nov 2009 | 3:31 am Playfish sees social games as industry driver (Reuters)Reuters - The video games sector has yet to gain from a downturn where consumers stay home to play, but social games creator Playfish says the industry is just beginning a new growth spurt.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 4 Nov 2009 | 3:30 am Apple's partner sells 5000 iPhones in China debut - Atlanta Journal Constitution
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 4 Nov 2009 | 3:26 am Pinstriped Cashmere Kindle Case Is So Very English
Now that the Kindle has ventured outside its home, the land of cowboys, blue jeans and beef, it seems that it should get a change of clothes. The Amazon-supplied leather jacket may make the e-reader look all cool and James Dean in its native land, but overseas we’re a little more conservative. So it seems very fitting that the first English Kindle case to reach our inbox is a wool and cashmere pinstripe number, the very essence of the City Gent in protective rectangular form. It costs 22 Pounds Sterling ($36), and with its foam lining works as a protective slip case rather than mimicking a paper book’s cover like the official Kindle uniform. The maker, UK Wrappers, also offers a range of materials and designs, including a couple of tartans for Scottish Kindle owners, and a Paisley-lined number for the Irish. It’s all very international, although I now feel that my Kindle is a little underdressed here in Spain. What should he wear, I wonder? Suggestions in the comments. Product page [UK Wrappers. Thanks, Debbie!] See Also:
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 4 Nov 2009 | 3:22 am Microsoft overhauls MSN home page - TG Daily
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 4 Nov 2009 | 3:12 am Waveboard Puts Google Wave iPhone Application Up For Sale
As you can tell from the short demo video below, the app does exactly what you think it does: it displays ‘waves’ and lets you search historical ones, start new ones and manage your contacts. It also opens external links in a custom browser without the need to leave the app. Waveboard also supports push notifications through a workaround (you need both the Prowl iPhone app and the Mac version of Waveboard), although they did say the next iteration will have proper push notifications. While the interface is a bit clunky and there are some bugs left to iron out, the dedicated app sure beats simply using Safari on your iPhone to visit wave.google.com (which works too, just slower). (Hat tip to AppsFire)
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 
Source: TechCrunch | 4 Nov 2009 | 3:06 am Waveboard Puts Google Wave iPhone Application Up For SaleWe already knew Waveboard was bringing Google Wave to both the desktop and the iPhone with two dedicated clients, but you'll be interested to know the iPhone app is now live on the App Store and available...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 Nov 2009 | 3:06 am Thai PTTEP sees Montara start-up sometime in 2010BANGKOK, Nov 4 (Reuters) - Thailand's PTT Exploration and Production (PTTEP) said on Wednesday the start-up of the Montara field in Australia might be delayed from the first quarter of 2010 to an unspecified...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 4 Nov 2009 | 3:05 am Sound Egg Chair: A Cocoon for Your Crib
If you have any kind of imagination, you will have taken a look at the classic 1960s Ovalia egg-chair, perhaps during its starring role in Men in Black, and wondered why somebody didn’t make an uglier version, filled with sound dampening material and speakers, and take a photo of it with full-frontal flash, rendering it even nastier-looking. Well, good news! Somebody saw inside your twisted mind and actually went and did it. The result is the Sound Egg Chair, incorporating 5.1 surround sound. The $1500 seat has six pairs of jack sockets on the back so you can trail cables from it like fluid pipes from a Matrix-style person-pod, and it will of course accept sound input of any kind — video games and movies being the main selling points. It’s actually kind of cool, and we’re sure that when you aren’t illuminating the interior with a camera’s flash bulb it looks as good as Henrik Thor-Larsen’s original. You can even choose the color of the foam inside, as well as the plastic outside. Weirdly, all the foam color options will cost an extra $25, except burgundy, which the makers seem to agree was possibly the worst color ever invented. Product page [Sound Egg. Thanks, Joel!] 
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 4 Nov 2009 | 3:02 am Nigeria's Oando sees 15,000 bpd of oil by Q2, 2010CAPE TOWN, Nov 4 (Reuters) - Nigerian energy firm Oando Plc plans to produce up to 15,000 barrels per day (bpd) of oil in the second quarter of next year, the chief executive officer said on Wednesday...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 4 Nov 2009 | 2:59 am Digital China to spend $66 mln on Japan IT firmTOKYO, Nov 4 (Reuters) - Digital China Holdings and its affiliates will invest as much as 6 billion yen ($66.4 million) in Japanese system developer SJI Inc , underlining the growing appetite for overseas...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 4 Nov 2009 | 2:54 am UPDATE 1-Akers Biosciences sees FY substantially below mkt view* Says hurt by lack of government contract for BreathScanSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 4 Nov 2009 | 2:53 am UPDATE 1-Japan's Cosmo Oil to idle CDU till Jan or later* 85,000 bpd No.6 CDU at Yokkaichi refinery to be kept shutSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 4 Nov 2009 | 2:53 am Firefox Passes IE6 In Browser ShareJared sends word of Ars Technica coverage of Net Applications' monthly browser share numbers. What's significant this time is that Firefox has finally passed IE6 in worldwide share. "Internet Explorer remains ahead of the rest of the competition, but since month after month it continues to lose ground to all other browsers, Firefox has now finally surpassed IE6, which is easily the most hated version of Microsoft's browser. ... In October, all browsers except for IE and Opera showed positive growth. Between October and September, Internet Explorer dropped a significant 1.07 percentage points (from 65.71 percent to 64.64 percent) and Firefox moved up a sizeable 0.32 percentage points (from 23.75 percent to 24.07 percent). ... Although IE's decline seems to be unceasing, the real shame is that the old versions have more share than the newer ones (we can only hope that as Windows 7 gains popularity, this trend will reverse)." Ars presents a graph with their own site's browser share picture, and as you might expect it's very different from the general population's.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 4 Nov 2009 | 2:52 am Chinese Internet startups get crimped on crowded Web (Reuters)Reuters - Entrepreneurs are finding the road to Internet riches in China increasingly rough, facing a thicket of regulatory issues, stiff competition and a frontier mentality that leads to frequent underhanded practices.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 4 Nov 2009 | 2:48 am HTC launches the HD2 in Europe and Asia, reconfirms stateside availability in early 2010
Seeing as HTC's CEO Peter Chou sorta slipped up and mentioned this back in October, it's not exactly, you know, news news - but just in case you were a little bit shaky on the dates, HTC has gone ahead and confirmed that the 1 Ghz, WinMo 6.5-powered HTC HD2 will be coming to the United States "with a major US carrier in early 2010. "
Source: CrunchGear | 4 Nov 2009 | 2:45 am HTC launches the HD2 in Europe and Asia, reconfirms stateside availability in early 2010
Seeing as HTC’s CEO Peter Chou sorta slipped up and mentioned this back in October, it’s not exactly, you know, news news – but just in case you were a little bit shaky on the dates, HTC has gone ahead and confirmed that the 1 Ghz, WinMo 6.5-powered HTC HD2 will be coming to the United States “with a major US carrier in early 2010. ” Note that they specifically say a US carrier – implying that it’ll be just one, at least right off the bat. The rumor mill has endlessly pinned this one as being destined for T-Mobile, so it’s at least somewhat safe to assume that’s where its heading. Either way, we’ll be getting it a bit later than our overseas brethren; in the same press release, HTC disclosed that HD2 shipments in Europe and Taiwan are heading out right this second, and the rest of Asia should see it hit the shelves over the next few weeks. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Source: MobileCrunch | 4 Nov 2009 | 2:40 am UPDATE 2-Socar eyes Italy plant stake; to up Asia term salesSINGAPORE, Nov 4 (Reuters) - Azerbaijan's state oil firm Socar plans to take a "substantial" stake in an Italian oil refinery next year and aims to raise the proportion of term exports of Azeri Light crude...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 4 Nov 2009 | 2:37 am Ambani dispute back to square one as judge quitsMUMBAI, Nov 4 (Reuters) - A high-profile legal dispute between India's billionaire Ambani brothers was disrupted on Wednesday when a judge withdrew from a Supreme Court hearing, citing potential conflict...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 4 Nov 2009 | 2:36 am UPDATE 1-Baker Hughes Q3 profit fallsNov 4 (Reuters) - U.S. oilfield services company Baker Hughes Inc posted an 87 percent slide in third-quarter profit on Wednesday as the oil and gas drilling industry recovers slowly from the past year's...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 4 Nov 2009 | 2:29 am UPDATE 2-Nobel Biocare says market share losses halted* CEO says group not losing further market share in 2009Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 4 Nov 2009 | 2:28 am Flickr Sprouts App Garden: Five Cool Apps We DiscoveredFlickr, the ever-more-popular photo-sharing service, has a five-year history of apps built on its API. From the interesting to the useful to the pretty to the downright silly, these applications make up...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 Nov 2009 | 2:28 am FACTBOX-China's liquefied natural gas import dealsBEIJING, Nov 4 (Reuters) - U.S. major ExxonMobil Corp has reached a preliminary deal to sell 2 million tonnes a year of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from its Papua New Guinea project to China's Sinopec...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 4 Nov 2009 | 2:20 am Amazon Turns On The Twitter Pump To Fuel Referral FeesTonight, Amazon sent an email to members of Amazon Associates letting them know about a new feature: Twitter integration. Basically, when you're logged into your Associate account, you'll see a new "Share...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 Nov 2009 | 2:15 am Amazon Turns On The Twitter Pump To Fuel Referral Fees
Here’s why this is interesting: As Amazon clearly notes at the end of its email (copied below), you will earn referral money for anyone that clicks on these links and buys a product. Obviously, links that bring in referral fees are nothing new, this has been going on with blogs for a long time. But Twitter users do love to click on links, so this feature could actually mean some real money for popular Twitter users with a massive following. And it’s yet another way that companies — and now even Twitter’s users — are making money off of Twitter, which Twitter won’t see a dime of (presumably, anyway). Something else to think about: A lot of blogs disclose when they’re supplying you with a referral link that they will make money from (though certainly not all of them). But on Twitter, that’s going to be hard for people to do even if they wanted to because of the 140 character limit. Other social sites, like MySpace, for example, do not allow you to post affiliate links. Twitter, it would seem, has no problem with this. In fact, at least one employee tweeted that he was excited for the launch. You can find out more about Amazon’s rules for this type of stuff on its FAQ page. Below, find the text of the email that was sent out to Associates members.
[photo: flickr/177] Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Source: TechCrunch | 4 Nov 2009 | 2:15 am Acadia Gets Cloud-computing Venture Rolling in Asia - PC World
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 4 Nov 2009 | 2:01 am Peek's Twitter-Only Device Goes On Sale [Voices]By Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal Peek, a New York mobile start-up, has begun selling TwitterPeek, a new device for posting and reading Twitter updates. TwitterPeek became available on Amazon (AMZN) and Peek’s Web site Tuesday. Its $100 price includes a full keyboard, always-on tweet delivery and nationwide Internet coverage, plus six months of service. After that, service costs $8 a month, but there is no contract. An alternate lifetime plan, without monthly charges, costs $200. Peek sells other handheld devices that aren’t cellphones, including the Peek Classic and Peek Pronto, which are designed for emailing and text-messaging but don’t make calls. It’s pitching TwitterPeek as a way to “unleash the thrill of Twitter on the go,” particularly for Twitter users without smart phones. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 4 Nov 2009 | 2:00 am Willow's Playlist: Acoustic Piano From Vocalist Phoe Nix: Think Tori Amos meets Kate Bush in Second LifeExclusive to NWN, Willow Caldera covers SL's burgeoning live music scene Few singers in either world can boast a voice so crystal clear and haunting that the collective hair of the audience stands on end...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 Nov 2009 | 1:45 am $30/month iTunes "Cable Killer" Subscription Service On The Way?By David Ponce The word on the street (meaning Peter Kafka from AllThingsD) is that Apple has been going around TV networks over the last few weeks pitching a $30/month subscription service that would...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 Nov 2009 | 1:44 am Cellphones, Texts and Lovers [Voices]By David Brooks, Columnist, New York Times Since April 2007, New York magazine has posted online sex diaries. People send in personal accounts of their nighttime quests and conquests. Some of the diaries are unusual and sad. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 4 Nov 2009 | 1:15 am Really, Peek? We Need a Dedicated Twitter Device? [Voices]By Drake Martinet | Contributor, GigaOm, Contributor, GigaOm For those who thought its email-only device targeted too broad a market, Peek Inc. has gone even more niche — and more absurd — with the first mobile device dedicated entirely to Twitter. TwitterPeek, as the gadget is branded, enables users to read and send tweets, reply, retweet and send direct messages on the go. The device sells for $99 plus an $8 monthly fee or $200 for a lifetime of service. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 4 Nov 2009 | 1:04 am How Far Will Google Wave Go? [Voices]By Dan Woods, Writer, Forbes.com Google Wave (GOOG), the Internet giant’s new online collaboration tool, has generated much buzz among developers, and now it has a large geeky fan following doing strange and relatively useless things. You can check out some of the silliness at the Google Wave Extensions List. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 4 Nov 2009 | 1:03 am Open University talks clouds with MS and Google - Register
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 4 Nov 2009 | 1:02 am The Space Station's IT guys [Voices]By Mark Harris, Contributor, CNET UK It’s the most expensive single thing ever built (£92bn and counting), the quickest manned vehicle in existence (17,300mph) and the staging point for future Moon and Mars missions. But when computers on board the International Space Station go down, the astronauts living there do the same as any office drone in Slough — they call IT. We were lucky enough to meet Tyson Tucker and Joey Crawford, the NASA flight controllers responsible for maintaining uptime in mankind’s first permanent space colony. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 4 Nov 2009 | 1:02 am Google Redefines Disruption: The “Less Than Free” Business Model [Voices]By Bill Gurley, Partner, Benchmark Capital I like to think of myself as an aficionado of business disruption. After all, as a venture capitalist it is imperative to understand ways in which a smaller private company can gain the upper hand on a large incumbent. One of the most successful ways to do this is to change the rules of the game in such a way that the incumbent would need to abandon or destroy its core business in order to lay chase to your strategy. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 4 Nov 2009 | 1:01 am Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac arrives
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 Product Reviews (blog) | T-Mobile USA Restores Voice, Data Services After Disruption PC World T-Mobile USA has restored voice and data services to users after an eight-hour outage that affected nearly 1.7 million subscribers. "T-Mobile confirms it has fully restored voice and text/picture messaging services for customers affected by ... T-Mobile experiencing widespread outage T-Mobile USA Seeing Service Outages Voice, Data Outage Strikes T-Mobile Customers |
The e-book seems to be the next big thing as we roll into the end of 2009. What with the Kindle 2, the nook, and others coming on the scene, it’s interesting to watch what’s coming next. For example: the Alex eBook Reader. It’s running Android, and has an absolutely insane frame rate (for an e-book reader).
Now to be fair, the Alex only has a frame rate of 3 FPS. But when you compare it to other readers, that have a rate of (generally) 0 FPS, you’re talking a significant improvement. This will allow the Alex to show simple animation, and other types of moving data. The Alex also sports dual screens, a 6 inch reader screen and a smaller touch capable screen mounted below. Maximum PC has a complete write up (and teardown) of the Alex, and they go into a little more depth about what the Marvell chipset is capable of.
Our series of ScamVille posts on social gaming scams are nearly over. There have been some surprises along the way, like Zynga, RockYou and MySpace making quick policy changes to protect consumers. But we want to end this series with a glimmer of hope, and a proposed way for app developers to make a good living over the long run. All previous posts can be read here (including updates at the bottom).
During our research we spoke to dozens of scam artists, game developers, advertisers and legitimate and illegitimate middlemen. One company was consistently mentioned as being the most above board with their approach to the market – TrialPay. So to end the series, we’ve asked TrialPay CEO Alex Rampell to write a guest post on how he sees the market, and how it can move forward in a healthy way.
TrialPay is an 80 person company company in the payment processing and promotions space that works with over 7500 companies like Skype, McAfee, Match.com, Photobucket, Kmart, 1800Flowers, and Playfish. Alex started TrialPay four years ago after pioneering the use of “alternative payments” in consumer software products and games, and previously co-founded a company that became known as SiteAdvisor.
Alex believes that the recent coverage about the dangers of advertisements and advertising in the social gaming space is a welcome debate that may help save this industry from what this insider sees as the social gaming equivalent of the “tragedy of the commons,” where all constituents – users, advertisers, offer providers, and app developers – could permanently lose. The recent Zynga, RockYou, and MySpace announcements are an encouraging first step, but more needs to happen.
In an efficient ad marketplace, the top keyword usually goes to whoever can spend the most money on it, normalized for conversion. Who can afford to spend the most money? Unfortunately, it’s not always the company with the best product, service, or price; under pure laissez faire advertising, it can be the company that tricks, lies, and steals more pennies out of each customer than any competitor. This often forces ethical competitors to make a very tough choice: roll over and stagnate (or die), or play a similar game. Playing to win means staying microscopically behind the red line or breaking the rules and not getting caught.
Let’s keep that as the backdrop as I tell a sordid story about lead generation on the Internet.
First, “offers” and “incentives” don’t have to be dirty words, and when used properly provide consumers better value. Four quick examples:
These real examples work very well for all parties, all of them can be and have been extended to social games, and it would be hard to argue that they are not legitimate. The problem is that they are crowded out by less legitimate alternatives that are proliferating today, a theme which Michael nailed in his last post. Incentive marketing can be a disaster if not done right, though, and the “win-win-win” can turn into “lose-lose-lose.”
Example Screenshot: Remember Amazon.com’s free shipping if you spend over $25? No such thing as shipping in online games, but Restaurant City, one of the leading Playfish games with over 17M monthly active users has offered customers a free movie ticket to anyone who selects the $39.99 option
Example Screenshot: PetSociety, Playfish’s most popular title with over 21M monthly active users, enables customers to purchase flowers from FTD during Valentine’s Day and receive 8,000 coins toward their account.
Consumers Scamming Advertisers – Cash For Clunkers: Back in the late 90’s and even after the bubble burst, a lot of companies offered you “cash” for signing up for offers (like Blockbuster, Vonage, etc). Netflip (aka MetaReward) scaled to nearly $70M in revenue before being shut down by its acquirer, Experian. The reason? The lead quality was bad – no, atrocious. At one point in 2006, Earthlink was paying $200 to acquire a customer for its moribund dialup business. “Cash back” sites would offer consumers $100 to sign up for a $20/month service, which said consumers would summarily cancel, netting the cash back site a $100 profit and Earthlink a $200 loss. Result: Consumers scammed advertisers, and advertisers ran for the hills, but it took years for this to happen and the ecosystem to devolve.
Advertisers Scamming Consumers – Free iPods: A few years later, and fueled by cheap media, “Free iPods” (often referred to as “Free iPod Scams” and later encompassing “Free [product X]”) grew to over a half billion dollar/year industry. It was a pure breakage model; your iPod would be delivered, but only if you got through dozens of pages of co-registration advertisements and offers. It got scammier and scammier since barriers to entry were low, and whoever scammed customers the most received the most revenue to get more customers. Everyone went along for the ride because every website and ad network benefited in the form of more “free iPod” advertisements. Eventually, the FTC came in. Result: Consumers got scammed, and legitimate advertisers ran for the hills, but this too took years.
Now it’s 2009 and the age of social networking. Replace “free iPod” with “free virtual currency” and see if you can figure out how this story could end. It’s actually worse because every time a consumer signs up for another offer, he or she earns more currency – yet by the 100th offer, the chance of lead quality being high for non-shopping offers (e.g., Gap, BestBuy, Target, etc) is infinitesimal; somebody who immediately signs up for both Netflix and Blockbuster to earn coins will probably be a bad customer for both. Returning to the “tragedy of the commons,” the network (or app developer) with a conscience for quality who won’t let consumers do 100 untargeted offers will simply be out-monetized by the network/developer who will, and that hurts the long term prosperity of everyone.
Many legitimate advertisers have already started to cut their payouts or bail, such that the “scammy” offers yield the highest returns. Many app developers don’t want to run scammy offers but don’t have a choice if they are to stay competitive in another tragedy of the commons.
There’s also a large obfuscation layer between the user and the advertiser. It often looks like this:
The offer providers are companies like Offerpal, SuperRewards, DoubleDing, Gambit, Firecue, GratisPay, and to some extent my own TrialPay, and ad networks are companies like Adteractive, CPAStorm, SearchCactus, Gratis Internet, ClickBooth, Affiliate.com, etc. The app developers often rotate different offer providers, and the offer providers often rotate different ad networks, even though the user at the beginning and the advertiser at the end stay constant. This makes it easier for users to scam advertisers, harder for offer providers to correctly track completions (there are more links in the chain to break – many people sign up for offers and are not “credited”), and easier for scammy offers to keep resurfacing such that the game publishers don’t always know what’s going on. It’s the price they pay for higher short term revenue.
Moreover, user complaints are often directed at the advertiser since the offer provider and ad network are relatively invisible in this chain, which is why you’ll hear many app developers and offer providers claim they get no complaints even though scammy offers collectively yield tens of thousands of complaints to various attorneys general, the FTC, and internet message boards. Despite this clever obfuscation, it’s still bad for the game publisher; users have less money to spend directly (since they had a chunk of change “scammed” away), and ill-will is bred towards the game publisher.
It doesn’t have to end this way – there are numerous legitimate forms of incentive marketing (see my initial four examples), but they’re not as profitable on a short term basis as allowing users to scam advertisers 100 times, or allowing advertisers to scam users several times (even the most naïve users get the hint after a few interactions). This has been tough for my company because we’ve felt the only way for us to “win” was not to play the game, and focus on higher quality and sustainability. That’s ok because only a small fraction of our revenue comes from social gaming, so we aren’t desperate to monetize at any cost, but I’d hate to see the industry implode.
So how do we emerge from this sad state of affairs?
The solution is a mixture of both. Having Facebook crack the whip does nothing to solve the problem of users scamming advertisers, which imperils the whole ecosystem. Indeed, we work with companies like McAfee and Skype, assiduously measure our quality because we work directly with the vast majority of our advertisers, and we have seen the tremendous volume (and often abysmal quality) of incentivized social gaming traffic sour some advertisers to the point of throwing the baby out with the proverbial bathwater.
The problem is similar to click fraud in search engine marketing, and the solution is similar:
Advertiser Feedback Loops: Offer providers need to establish direct relationships with advertisers and create a quality feedback loop. The vast majority of our advertising deals are direct, and we insist on feedback loops (did the user “quick cancel” a trial?) so we can eliminate bad sources of traffic. It doesn’t mean that all of our traffic is perfect, but we spend a tremendous of time eliminating the negative externalities, which provide for better unit economics. App developers who care about quality might even want to consider working directly with advertisers, lest they receive the lowest common denominator of payouts from offer providers who don’t focus on quality.
Limits on Offers: There should be strict limits on what users can sign up for – not by law but by rational self-interest, since this will yield more long term revenue. The vast majority of our “alternative payment” business revolves around letting users pay for an item like McAfee VirusScan by transacting with one and only one advertiser of the user’s choice. This increases the quality, which lets advertisers pay us more, and in turn lets us pay McAfee more. Advertisers will pay more if they recognize that fraud is lower and quality is higher, just like with search engine marketing. Multiple offers can work (e.g., retail shopping at different stores) but it’s much more complex in lead generation.
Game Publishers Should Insist on Long-Term Partnerships: Game publishers who think about long term quality (and don’t swap out providers, where the providers don’t swap out networks) will make more long-term money – partially because they won’t burn as many customers, but primarily because quality breeds higher payouts from advertisers.
Let’s hope we can solve the tragedy of the social gaming commons. Virtual currency is a multi-billion dollar industry growing at a massive rate, and reckless short term behavior can threaten an even more prosperous long term future.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
While it’s a little bit early to be busting out the green outfits to cosplay while you wait in line at midnight, there is some information trickling out about the new Zelda game. In particular, Miyamoto is talking about gameplay.
I played the last Zelda game on the Wii, and just couldn’t get into it. The controls felt a little odd to me, and I just couldn’t get into the game. That may change in the next game however, since in a recent interview Miyamoto said that they new Zelda game will use the MotionPlus accessory, making the sword fights more realistic and less like you are pointing at the screen.
At this point, that’s all we really know. The poster released at E3 really didn’t give us any major clues about the future of the franchise, and Nintendo ain’t talking yet. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Mary Shelley wasn't worried about reanimated corpses stalking Europe, but by casting a technological innovation in the starring role of Frankenstein, she was able to tap into present-day fears about technology overpowering its masters and the hubris of the inventor. Orwell didn't worry about a future dominated by the view-screens from 1984, he worried about a present in which technology was changing the balance of power, creating opportunities for the state to enforce its power over individuals at ever-more-granular levels.CORY DOCTOROW: RADICAL PRESENTISMNow, it's true that some writers will tell you they're extrapolating a future based on rigor and science, but they're just wrong. Karel Čapek coined the word robotto talk about the automation and dehumanization of the workplace. Asimov's robots were not supposed to be metaphors, but they sure acted like them, revealing the great writer's belief in a world where careful regulation could create positive outcomes for society. (How else to explain his idea that all robots would comply with the "three laws" for thousands of years? Or, in the Foundation series, the existence of a secret society that knows exactly how to exert its leverage to steer the course of human civilization for millennia?)
For some years now, science fiction has been in the grips of a conceit called the "Singularity"--the moment at which human and machine intelligence merge, creating a break with history beyond which the future cannot be predicted, because the post-humans who live there will be utterly unrecognizable to us in their emotions and motivations. Read one way, it's a sober prediction of the curve of history spiking infinity-ward in the near future (and many futurists will solemnly assure you that this is the case); read another way, it's just the anxiety of a generation of winners in the technology wars, now confronted by a new generation whose fluidity with technology is so awe-inspiring that it appears we have been out-evolved by our own progeny.
This $60,000 "bomb detection wand" is much-loved by Iraqi security forces. American military representatives say it's about as useful for finding IEDs as a ouija board. [New York Times]
Biopolitics of Popular Culture Seminar (Thanks, Jim!)
(via Making Light)
Source: Boing Boing | 3 Nov 2009 | 10:33 pm
If this latest commercial is any indication, the Motorola Droid is going to be air dropped from stealth fighter planes into random locations where people have no idea what it is.
If this latest commercial is any indication, the Motorola Droid is going to be air dropped from stealth fighter planes into random locations where people have no idea what it is.
Honestly, it’s a pretty cool commercial. Complete CGI job, but very cool none the less. I’m hoping that they don’t run it into the ground, but considering that the phone comes out on the 6th, we’ll probably be okay.
I’m waiting for the inevitable, when the phone starts singing Daisy from “2001″.
[via BGR]
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
[Ireland] Social media consultants Simplyzesty started using Twitter Lists to list blogs. However, a brainwave has lead them to take Twitter Lists to their logical conclusion: creating lists of Twitter users in entire countries. They’ve launched a Twitter list for the UK and the list of users in Ireland is currently going crazy. They call it “crowdsourcing populations”. Who knows – this could end up being a sort of crowd-sourced yellow pages/people directory.
A couple of hours ago they launched a USA version with a script built to make the listings automatic. The plan is to do is to cover the USA in 72 hours.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
In our October 8 post on the state of the Skype sale and litigation, we ended with a prediction: “The likely outcome of all of this remains the same – Joltid will get a stake of some size in Skype. But given the players involved, anything could still happen.” If GigaOm and the NYTimes are right, that’s exactly what’s happening. Even the “anything could still happen” part.
The old Skype founders will now have a stake in Skype according to unnamed sources. That makes sense. It was what eBay was negotiating with Skype long before the current buyout offer, and the team has to get something in exchange for dropping the intellectual property litigation.
But Index Ventures, the architect of the deal, is apparently out. For Silverlake Partners and Andreeseen Horowitz to agree to that either means there’s too much money involved for anyone to be worried about business loyalties, or there’s enough of a smoking gun that Index had no choice but to get away from the deal and all that liability.
Whatever the truth, everyone is in for a wild ride. Nobody who does business with the Skype founders ever seems to come out of it happy. Maybe Marc Andreessen has the patience to change all that this time around.
Just one problem, though. No one has ever described Marc Andreessen as a patient man.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The new MSN homepage debuts tonight and you would be completely correct for thinking the recipe Microsoft (MSFT) has cooked up to inform its design ethos–white, clean and hiply modern–has definite echoes of a certain longtime tech rival.
That would be Apple (AAPL), of course, with a big dollop of Twitter and Facebook tossed in and finished off with a generous sprinkling of Microsoft’s new Bing search service.
For those who care: The MSN butterfly logo remains, although it appears to have lost a lot of weight too.
(You can view a preview of the site here.)
The launch is the first major upgrade of the MSN main page in–if you can believe it–a decade, part of an overall rehaul that the software giant has been doing throughout its money-losing online services division.
That has included the launch of Bing in May, which has been a success for Microsoft, adding a small amount of search market share and, more importantly, some much-needed respect to its long-beleaguered consumer Web efforts.
Its online execs are trying to keep up the innovation momentum with the new MSN redesign and–as you can see below from the various screenshot–it is a major shift for the portal site.
Together, MSN and Windows Live have about 100 million unique monthly visitors, putting Microsoft typically third behind Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO).
The company hopes to do better with a fresher MSN, which is clearly aimed, first and foremost, at clearing up the clutter and link-heavy old MSN homepage.
MSN execs said the new main page has about half the “blue” links.
(See a video interview I also did with MSN exec Bob Visse about all this here, along with other videos Microsoft did with its MSN staff.)
The new top features a big image module, with inline video and drastically reduced topic areas–as BoomTown has previously reported–limited to news, sports, entertainment, money and lifestyle.
Under that is a more customizable news module, to which feature tabs can also be added, such as for the World Series or–prolonged sigh–Balloon Boy coverage.
On the bottom left is a much-goosed local module that resolves to beefed-up local sites, which is right next another section featuring Bing top searches.
Bing is present in every part of the site now, with Microsoft stressing it and using its structured data to improve the consumer experience.
That’s important for Bing search too, since MSN provides 45 percent of its traffic.
Communications modules are to the right, mid-page and on the bottom.
Unlike AOL and Yahoo, which have added the ability to put third-party email on their homepages, only Hotmail is now available on the new MSN one, although that is likely to change soon.
But perhaps the design element that will garner the most attention is the prominent placement of both Twitter and Facebook tabs in the bottom communications module, right next to one for Windows Live.
This allows users to update their status and get instant access to the status of friends and followers.
“We wanted to cut the clutter, while also giving users one convenient place to find what they need quickly,” said Scott Moore, executive producer of MSN in the U.S., its most important market, in an interview earlier today with me.
“People are overloaded with information and they wanted us to fix that, even if the service is not ours.”
The focus on Facebook and Twitter was simply due to intense user interest in the popular social networking sites.
“Facebook has popped and Twitter was really growing,” said Moore, who noted that there was the possibility of adding other third-party apps in the future.
A heavy emphasis on apps was a key strategy of Yahoo’s homepage redesign, officially launched in late July, which SVP Tapan Bhat touted at an analysts meeting last week as having increased page views and engagement.
Advertising on the page is perhaps the most conservative part, with units that remain largely as before.
The new MSN homepage will begin rolling out now, eventually reaching about 10 percent of users until early next year. After that, it is expected to become widely available to U.S. customers and then worldwide.
Here are screen shots to peruse of the changes (click on the images to make them larger):
Old Homepage:
New Homepage:
Local Edition:
Twitter Section:
Facebook Section:
And here is the official Microsoft press release:
New MSN Designed to Be the Best Home Page on the Web
Fresh, new design delivers best of Bing, latest in news and entertainment, instant access to Facebook and Twitter, and customized local information in one place.
REDMOND, Wash.–Nov. 3, 2009–Microsoft Corp. today unveiled a preview of its most significant home page redesign in over a decade. The new MSN home page is designed to be the best home page on the Web, with powerful Bing search, the top news and hottest entertainment, and some of the most popular social networks–all in a fresh new look. The new home page will deliver comprehensive local information from the new MSN local information offering, MSN Local Edition, also unveiled today. Beginning today, anyone can preview the new home page at http://preview.msn.com. The new home page will begin rolling out today and become widely available to U.S. customers early next year.
Ninety percent of people surveyed find home pages such as MSN to be valuable, and they like the convenience of a comprehensive site.* Nearly 100 million people in the U.S. visit MSN every single month, and MSN added over 10 million new customers in the last year alone. However, today’s sites often fall short of top customer needs and many haven’t kept up with evolving trends. Extensive customer research highlights that people want less clutter and easier access to information and services they care about, including search services that help them make decisions easier and faster.
“Now is the time to clean up the mess on the Web–people need less clutter and less hassle to find what matters most to them,” said Erik Jorgensen, corporate vice president, Microsoft. “Microsoft is uniquely invested in search, media experiences and technical innovation. Combining these assets to deliver our new MSN home page is a tremendous win for customers and advertisers.”
The clean, new MSN home page cuts through the clutter with 50 percent fewer links than the previous home page and a simplified navigation across news, entertainment, sports, money and lifestyle. The new MSN home page also embraces the latest customer trends by deeply integrating powerful search from Bing and providing easy access to Facebook, Twitter and Windows Live services, comprehensive local information and in-line video. Sophisticated technology powers the home page to deliver personally relevant information, and improved performance satisfies people’s need for speed.
New key features of the MSN home page include these:
* Innovative search technology from Bing. Deeper Bing integration on the new home page helps people make faster and more informed decisions and easily find the information they want from anywhere on the Web. Bing is deeply integrated as the core search service throughout the home page via key areas such as shopping, travel and local, and as a way of highlighting hot topics, trends or people.
* Information and news people care about. The new home page delivers against the No. 1 customer request–simplicity and ease of use–through its fresh design and smart categorization. In-line high-quality, top news and hot entertainment from trustworthy sources such as MSNBC, FOX Sports, Hulu and Hearst, and comprehensive local information provide a compelling one-stop shop for people to use as their home base online. More in-depth local information is offered on the new MSN Local Edition, which is the only local online source that smartly combines media with Bing search and provides access to real-time community news that is grouped by ZIP code.
* Convenient ways to communicate. Simplicity drove the clean integration of popular social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and Windows Live “What’s New,” which aggregates up to 50 Web activities, including Yelp, Flickr, Pandora and more, onto the MSN home page. People no longer have to jump from site to site to update their status, tweets or see what their friends are up to; the new home page makes it easy to view and update in-line.
“Customers told us they want the latest information from their favorite sources, their friends and the breadth of the Web–and the new MSN home page delivers via a fresh new look and new features,” Jorgensen said. “Today is an important transformation for MSN, and it’s just the beginning.”
Here is a video interview BoomTown did with Bob Visse, GM of MSN Product Management today at Microsoft (MSFT) offices in San Francisco.
The new MSN homepage debuts tonight with a redesign cutting clutter, adding the ability to access both top social networking sites Facebook and Twitter, a local focus and with Microsoft’s new Bing search service everywhere.
But, as you can see from the logo above, the MSN butterfly logo remains, although it’s slimmed down too.
(Read all about the details here.)
The launch is the first major upgrade of the MSN main page in a decade, part of an overall rehaul that the software giant has been doing throughout its money-losing online services division.
Here’s Visse talking about the new MSN homepage, as well as two video interviews that Microsoft did with MSN Designer Wende Copfer, as well as MSN Corporate VP Erik Jorgensen, MSN U.S. head Scott Moore and Cyrus Krohn, who leads local programming strategy.
Here are the videos:
MSN’s Bob Visse:
MSN Designer Wende Copfer:
MSN Execs Erik Jorgensen and Scott Moore:
MSN’s Local Lead Cyrus Krohn:
Robert Popper has posted an appreciation of Supreme Master Television, a cult-backed satellite television network I've seen advertised in airports around the world, but never before bothered to google. There's a lot to love in this clip. Robert: I'd like to know when we can say "hebbo!" to a Tarvuist Faith television channel.
Supreme Master TV has a website, the cult behind it operates a chain of vegan restaurants, and they have offices in Southern California. Their leader is one Supreme Master Ching Hai, and Rick Ross says it's more like ka-ching. That's her, at left (click for large size), and here's a Wikipedia article. She sells hair extensions and stuff. She has opinions on global warming. She sings spiritual lounge music. She designs "celestial clothes and sleeping mattresses for dogs," which are spiritually themed costumes designed to bring your "blessed canine friend" closer to enlightenment. If you do one thing today, please: watch the dog video.
Source: Boing Boing | 3 Nov 2009 | 9:09 pm
Last night we broke the story that Google would be teaming with a number of well known artists to launch a promotion for its Music Onebox search, which was released last week. Turns out, it’s launching a bit sooner than we thought: beginning tonight a number of well known artists will be offering exclusive songs and free downloads through Google’s Music search. To get the freebies and exclusives, simply run a Google query for the artist’s name (the album name works too in some cases).
One clarification: while these songs are being presented and promoted on Google, they’ll also be available on the site that’s actually streaming the songs — be it MySpace or Lala. In MySpace’s case the songs could also be potentially be surfaced on other search engines, though it sounds like artists will be asking their fans to search for them on Google as part of the promotion.
Included among artists giving away free MP3s as part of the promotion are:
Tim McGraw
Phoenix
Major Lazer
Mos Def
Zee Avi
And the following exclusives are being showcased on Google as well:
AFI – “Torch Song (Demo From Crash Love Sessions)”
– Search on Google for “AFI”Arctic Monkeys – “Catapult”
– Search on Google for “Arctic Monkeys”Bon Jovi – “We Weren’t Born To Follow [Acoustic Version] (Recorded Live From Inside The Actor’s Studio)”
Dead by Sunrise – “Let Down [Live]”
Green Day – “Know Your Enemy [Live In Tokyo]”
Kings of Leon – “Crawl (Miike Snow Remix)”
Lady Gaga – “Paparazzi (David Aude Remix)”
Linkin Park – “New Divide [Live]”
Luke Bryan – “Better Than My Heart”
Norah Jones – “Young Blood”
One Republic – “All The Right Moves (Live)”
Paramore – “Where The Lines Overlap [Acoustic Version]”
Snoop Dogg – “Upside Down (Featuring Nipsey Hussle)”
The Fray – “Be The One (Demo Version)”
Trey Songz – ” LOL[feat. Gucci Mane & Soulja Boy Tell 'Em] [Logan deGaulle Remix]”
Weezer – “(If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To (Live In Kansas City)”
Zac Brown Band – “Chicken Fried [Live From Bonnaroo]”
Image by thatcrazysteen.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
ARRRRR!
CTRL-ALT-BELAY!
The One Laptop Per Child project has seen mixed success. With competition from similar, but more familiar-looking items from Intel and others, the OLPC found itself suddenly competing in a market it had no intention of entering. But they're out there, they've had some serious orders, and despite some other speed bumps, has certainly lent a hand in increasing computer literacy in the developing world.
You may remember that the sequel to the XO laptop, as the OLPC hardware was actually called, was spied at Davos in January after its initial debut in May of 2008. It was noted at the time that there was some doubt as to whether it would be made, and now those doubts have come to glorious anti-fruition. The XO-2 is dead — but only because Negroponte decided it should be a tablet.
The One Laptop Per Child project has seen mixed success. With competition from similar, but more familiar-looking items from Intel and others, the OLPC found itself suddenly competing in a market it had no intention of entering. But they’re out there, they’ve had some serious orders, and despite some other speed bumps, has certainly lent a hand in increasing computer literacy in the developing world.
You may remember that the sequel to the XO laptop, as the OLPC hardware was actually called, was spied at Davos in January after its initial debut in May of 2008. It was noted at the time that there was some doubt as to whether it would be made, and now those doubts have come to glorious anti-fruition. The XO-2 is dead — but only because Negroponte decided it should be a tablet.
Don’t look at me like that. I know, right? Yet another tablet entering the fray, and this one (claims Negroponte) will only cost $75. Well, that’s it then. Guess we can pack up the CrunchPad (bless its heart) and go home. Apple is probably quaking in its loafers as well, since the same latte-sucking Volvo-jockeys who want the Apple Tablet also love the idea of the OLPC. Charity and all that. Buy one, give one is a great promotion, and for a $75 unit, it’s a price most can afford. Assuming they hit that price target, of which there is no guarantee. On the other hand, Microsoft is probably happy that there’s one less dual-touchscreen device to compete with the Courier.
Here’s what Negroponte had to say about the XO 3.0 in a recent interview with Xconomy:
2.0 has been replaced by two things: 1) model 1.75, same industrial design but an ARM inside, 2) model 3.0, totally different industrial design, more like a sheet of paper… completely plastic and unbreakable, waterproof, 1/4″ thick, full color, reflective and transmissive, no bezel, no holes. 1W. $75, ready in 2012.
Sounds like a fantasy winner! He also notes that the OLPC program is splitting into a hardware arm and grassroots/education arm. The original XO will be updated with a new processor but will continue to ship pretty much as is. They’re also requesting that OLPC be changed to “olpc,” a demand I find onerous (and pointless).
What the device would actually be capable of is anybody’s guess, but a basic e-book reader and browser seems to be the minimum feature set. I’m torn between an affinity for traditional computing (which is probably fundamental to a modern education) and traditional education, which the XO 3.0 would most certainly make easier. As a commenter at Slashdot points out, “in any third-world country access to ‘open source’ text books on any subject at zero extra cost would be more important than the actual “educational computer” functionality.” Text books to be sure, not to mention the world’s literature and current events. The village library just got a lot bigger.
Whatever happens, we can’t expect it before 2012, which really renders discussion moot, seeing as the entire landscape of tech will have changed by then. So I guess the CrunchPad and Apple Tablet aren’t in danger just yet. Hell, we’ll probably be on version 3.0 ourselves by that time. But while the consumer tech market is a moving target, third-world literacy and grassroots education are always welcome. Even though Negroponte has pretty much said that this is a business endeavor and not a charitable one, it may yet do a lot of good.
[via SlashGear]
According to sources close to the situation, Index Ventures and Michelangelo Volpi are out of the deal to buy Skype–and their lawsuit-loving nemeses, the founders of the Internet telephony service, are in.
Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis had sued Index and also partner Michelangelo Volpi via tech companies they control, Joltid and Joost.
The pair had already been in a legal battle over software licensing issues with eBay (EBAY), the company that had sold Skype to in 2005.
They then accused Index and Volpi, employing a reputation-bashing style, of using confidential information as part of a consortium bid to acquire a large chunk of Skype.
Volpi had been Joost’s CEO.
Volpi and Index fired back in court filings and both sides armed themselves with powerful PR guns too.
Ironically, Index was only a small part of the group that won the deal to acquire Skype from eBay recently.
News of the serious settlement talks was reported earlier this week by GigaOm’s Om Malik.
The New York Times’ Brad Stone also added significantly to the story about the settlement today, noting the Skype founders would be getting a stake and that Index “is most likely withdrawing from the deal.”
Well, most likely now means certainly for Index, sources told me, and the London-based venture firm that bid for Skype has to bid that deal goodbye.
More details to come, but it’s sure proof that the legal system, such as it was used, works.
What's wrong with a person in pajamas? [via Rebecca MacKinnon]Many Shanghai residents are used to loitering around the streets in their pajamas. But now the municipal government is making every effort to stop them from doing so, because it would be a "loss of face" for city authorities if a foreigner sees people walking the streets in pajamas during the 2010 World Expo. (...)
As a modern international metropolis, Shanghai has been playing host to foreigners for decades. So why have pajamas become embarrassing only now? And will it be okay for people to walk the streets in pajamas after the World Expo? Why should we change our habits and customs to suit foreigners' taste when we travel abroad as well as when we play host to them? Do we suffer from a sense of inferiority?
A quick Google of "shanghai" + "pajamas" reveals many articles in Western media over the past decade about Shanghai's pajama-wearing citizenry, and their government's fruitless attempts to mandate their fashion choices. Apparently, walking around in the street in your jammies is a familiar part of local culture in old neighborhoods there, in part because the realms of public and private space are so blurred in daily life.
Source: Boing Boing | 3 Nov 2009 | 7:41 pm
SwingVine, a site that lets you see what content is trending on the web, is adding real-time functionality. SwingVine aggregates data and news from across the web, analyzes the volume of online buzz and the reputation of various sources, evaluates user interactions on the site itself, and other information to surface the the most popular and noteworthy content on the web. It’s a hybrid of an aggregator of information on pop culture and news and an analytics site that actually measures what people are looking for on the web.
Adding the ability to see trends and buzz on the web in real-time makes complete sense for SwingVine. The startup determines trends based on factors such as volume, recency, and growth rate of web news, sales data, critic reviews, onsite pageviews, clicks, and other data points around topics. Swingvine is also launching a Facebook app to mine and aggregate trends from your existing Facebook friends, incorporating social results into your trends. You can connect SwngVine with Facebook via Facebook Connect.
So when users sign in, social trends are added based on the number of friends who engaged with various topics, the type of engagement (like vs comment vs share etc.), and the recency of engagement. Social trends can be separated from web trends. And unsurprisingly, when topics are popular in both a social circle and on the broader web, they are ranked higher.
As we’ve written in the past, content on SwingVine spreads over a number of verticals including music, movies, technology, gadgets, fashion and more. ou can also rate and comment on the item, and share your comment on Facebook, Digg or MySpace. The site’s purpose is noble— with so much content emerging on the web, from music to movies to news and tech gadgets, there is a need for a tool to help people know what’s worth reading into.
SwingVine competes with other small yet well-funded niche social search engines like OneRiot and Blekko, that also offer users a way to see the chatter, and make sense of trends, on the web. And of course, Google Trends and Twitter’s trending topics sites like Topsy (which just launched new features today)TweetMeme also serve a similar purpose as SwingVine.
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Let me translate that for those of you out there that aren’t “down with the lingo”. Pre-order Left 4 Dead 2, get Bill’s beret (from the original L4D) in Team Fortress 2. That’s it. That’s the deal. Well, you’ll save 10% on LFD2 because it’s a pre-order, but the only extra schwag you get is a cool hat in TF2.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mayor Mike says: "John Nese is the owner of Soda Pop Stop pop only store in LA. Listening to him rattle off what makes or breaks a good soft drink, makes me thirsty. Listening to his passion about supporting the little man in the face of large corporate pressure in the marketplace is just plain refreshing."
Galcos Soda Pop Stop in LA
Source: Boing Boing | 3 Nov 2009 | 7:01 pm
A great African American civil rights activist one said, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” That’s how I feel about copyright these days. You’ve got these entrenched business interests who seemingly have their favorite congressmen on speed-dial, and then you have people who, God forbid, would like to see these businesses embrace new, practical business models that don’t automatically assume their customers are potential criminals. But this! This latest development has me thinking, “You know what? Just shoot me. Go ahead. I don’t have to pay my student loans any more (take that, Citibank!), and I won’t have to worry about being treated like a criminal by the likes of whatever stupid entertainment company is in Congress’ good graces this week. Win-win.”
What the heck am I whinging about? It’s the leaked notes of an international copyright treaty, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, that’s in the process of being negotiated in Seoul. Everything’s very hush-hush, of course, and you don’t hear a damn thing about it on TV, no. No, that’s filled with crackpots on the left and right claiming that health care will fix everyone’s problems automatically or destroy the country as soon as it’s signed into law. As if things this complicated could be debated in 30-second segments.
Anyhow, the bullet points of the treaty, by way of Boing Boing:
• That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
• That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.
• That the whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.
• Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)
Awesome. My favorite part is that treaty signatories have to abide by U.S.-style copyright takedown convention. Don’t worry, Planet Earth, we’ve got your best interests in mind.
The heck we do!
Whatever, I’m tired of this he-said, she-said garbage, vis-à-vis copyright, as should be clear by the tone of the post.
I'm an archival researcher--I work part-time at Princeton Architectural Press in the editorial department and the other half of the week freelance researching book projects. Last year I researched the subject of Nothing for the author Joan Konner (former Dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism). Her book, You Don't Have to be Buddhist to Know Nothing, just came out last week. It's a sound bite history of the presence of Nothing in Western thought (including some essential bites from Eastern minds as well). The quotations come from a long list of thinkers, writers, artists, scholars (Dickinson, Sartre, Beckett, Rilke, Shakespeare, but also Steven Wright, Edward Albee, Philippe Petit, etc.). A really neat collage of Nothing.
The blog is a delight! I didn't know so much could be said about nothing.
You Don't Have to Be Buddhist to Know Nothing
Source: Boing Boing | 3 Nov 2009 | 6:56 pm
You may remember Photosynth, the impressive yet somehow unsatisfying photo collage tool from Microsoft. Though I always thrilled to the technical aspects, I’ve never taken a shine to it. Maybe it’s the photographer in me that prefers one well-composed photo to a hundred interlinked snapshots. One game developer, though, saw potential that I never even considered. Krystian Majewski has put together Trauma, what looks to be a very interesting point-and-click adventure game using Photosynth’s ability to essentially create “levels” out of pictures.
The abstract, psychological-exploration atmosphere reminds me somehow of the mesmerizing Mirror Stage, and the dreamy narration reminds me of Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks. At any rate, it looks like a compelling little adventure.
Note, I say Photosynth but the game apparently runs in Flash, which suggests it’s some Photosynth-ish derivative. We’ll see. The game will be released when it’s released, apparently; bookmark accordingly.
[via IndieGames]
Reuters - Beyonce will later this month release a live concert DVD and companion CD, and a new song, "Video Phone" featuring Lady Gaga.
Nope, you still can’t buy the Beatles on Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes. But next month you will finally be able to buy the band’s music in MP3 form, provided you’re willing to plunk down a bunch of cash.
$279.99, exactly.
What do you get for that? The same thing the band and EMI Music Group are already selling for $219: All of the band’s music, in a remastered stereo mix. But if you’re willing pay extra, you can now get the same tunes bundled up in a single USB stick. Like so:
People who care about this stuff will be pleased to know the files will be available in both FLAC and MP3 formats. More details here, although there does seem to be some confusion about whether there are 30,000 of these puppies or just a couple hundred. Either way, they go on sale Dec. 7 in the U.K. and the next day in the U.S.
By the way, if you’re the kind of Beatles fan who considers plunking down more than $200 for music you already own, then you’ve mostly like seen this. But it’s free to everyone, thanks to YouTube:
 PC World | Verizon Charges Motorola Droid Users for Exchange Access Wired News Verizon Wireless loves to nickel and dime its customers and the upcoming Motorola Droid presents new opportunities. Droid supports Microsoft Exchange's ActiveSync feature that lets users access email, calendar and contacts from their ... Verizon's Droid Data Plan Cheaper Than You Think Microsoft Exchange on Moto Droid to Cost Extra - Wrong! Motorola Milestone is GSM Droid |
The industry is definitely making big changes to self regulate around social gaming offer scams (complete background here, with updates). Zynga, the largest social gaming company and the worst offender when it comes to scams, said yesterday that they will take steps to remove scams from games. They were quickly followed by RockYou.
Today MySpace is making a big move itself. They are instituting a “zero tolerance for app scams” policy, says CEO Owen Van Natta, and are amending their apps developer terms of use to further restrict the types of offers than can be presented to users.
The existing terms of use already prohibit many types of scams and require clear and accurate descriptions of offers. But as we’ve shown in previous posts, sometimes a clear and accurate description hidden at the bottom of a page in 8 point type isn’t all that useful.
The addition MySpace is adding a requirement to have users opt in to any specific offer or promotion that includes a renewal or subscription.
Today, we’re adding a fifth principle that clarifies a specific use case that we feel is particularly damaging to the user experience: promotions that include hidden renewals without specific opt-in will not be permitted. Because it’s our belief opt-out offers are misleading and do not have the best interests of the users in mind, we will be updating our Terms of Use this week to better clarify this for users and developers.
Rules are great, but without enforcement the scammy offers never go away (this is the Facebook problem). MySpace says they will enforce these rules and will remove applications that don’t modify practices promptly:
Principles and policies are nothing without action and we will continue to enforce our Terms of Use to put our users first. If we find or are notified of violations of our Terms of Use we will contact the application developer and require that they modify their practices and adhere to our Terms. If we do not receive a prompt and appropriate response we will, as we have in the past, remove the offending application from the MySpace platform.
The proof is in the pudding, of course. But this is yet another big company stepping up to try to put a stop to social gaming application scams. It’s time for Facebook to make their move.
Here’s the full blog post:
MySpace’s Zero Tolerance Policy for App Scams
There has been increased discussion recently about how some application developers on the Web’s major social platforms are misleading consumers with deceptive practices. It’s important that users and developers clearly understand MySpace’s policies and approach to these activities.
The MySpace Apps Terms of Use clearly state that we prohibit any deceptive, misleading, and unfair activity through developer applications on MySpace. The Terms of Use require developers to provide accurate information to users and comply with specific rules around what information is being collected, payment terms, and promotional offers. They also prohibit spam and other malicious use.
Our Terms of Use were drafted with the following four principles in mind:
1. All MySpace users are entitled to a safe, scam-free application experience.
2. All offers to MySpace users must have a clear and accurate description which is not misleading or deceptive to users.
3. All offers to MySpace users must have a clear and conspicuous explanation of cost with no hidden fees.
4. No application is permitted to incentivize a user to provide their personal information in exchange for virtual goods or currency within the application.
Today, we’re adding a fifth principle that clarifies a specific use case that we feel is particularly damaging to the user experience: promotions that include hidden renewals without specific opt-in will not be permitted.
Because it’s our belief opt-out offers are misleading and do not have the best interests of the users in mind, we will be updating our Terms of Use this week to better clarify this for users and developers.
Principles and policies are nothing without action and we will continue to enforce our Terms of Use to put our users first. If we find or are notified of violations of our Terms of Use we will contact the application developer and require that they modify their practices and adhere to our Terms. If we do not receive a prompt and appropriate response we will, as we have in the past, remove the offending application from the MySpace platform.
Developers are our partners and we want to continue our collaborative and meaningful relationship with the development community. Having recently acquired iLike we have access to some of the most successful social application developers with a wealth of knowledge to inform us how we can have a smarter, more thoughtful application strategy.
If you have any questions about these policies or principles please reach out to our Partner Relations team at partnerrelations@myspace-inc.com.
We appreciate all of the feedback we’ve received from our users and developers and look forward to more great things to come for the MySpace Application Platform.
-Owen
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Verizon Wireless loves to nickel and dime its customers and the upcoming Motorola Droid presents new opportunities.
Droid supports Microsoft Exchange’s ActiveSync feature that lets users access email, calendar and contacts from their corporate servers running Exchange. But now they will have to pay for the privilege, says InfoWorld.
Droid users will have to pay at least an additional $15 a month on top of their data plan for Exchange access. That means $45 a month including Exchange support instead of $30 a month for a data only plan. Droid will be exclusively available on the Verizon network for $200 and with a two-year contract.
Verizon says the additional fees are justified because the Droid is a primarily targeted at consumers. The fee also applies to all smartphones, including the BlackBerry, that want to access corporate email, says Verizon.
But that may not be telling the whole story. In the case of the BlackBerry, users pay additional fees because the phones connect with a company’s BlackBerry Enterprise Systems and not the consumer-focused BlackBerry Internet System, points out Mashable. And that involves additional licensing fees.
The Droid, though, runs the open source and free Android 2.0 platform with ActiveSync support already built in. That means users shouldn’t have to pay extra fees for their device to connect with their corporate servers.
It also defeats some of the good intentions behind Android. Wasn’t Android expected to help bring in cost savings for carriers and consumers?
See Also:
Photo: (tnkgrl/Flickr)
Many of us spend hours a day on our browsers surfing the web both at home and from the office, but we don’t really do much with our web history, which could really serve as a goldmine of information. Nebul.us, a startup launching today in private beta, is looking to tap into this data, leveraging it to offer a cloud-based web history, a productivity tool for monitoring how you’re spending your time online, and a social link sharing service. The site is now in private beta, and 500 TechCrunch readers will be able to gain access by using the invite code ‘techcrunch’.
Here’s how it works: after installing a browser plugin (the service currently has support for Firefox with IE, Chrome, and Safari on the way), your browser will start monitoring your browsing history and uploading it to the service. Everything is intitally locked down in a private mode — meaning nobody else can see it — unless you visit the site and explicitly decide to share it with your friends. Or, if there are some sites you’d always be comfortable sharing with your friends, you can choose to add it to your ‘Trusted’ list, which means they’ll automatically be shared. The site has a friends system so you can determine who is allowed to following your browser history, or you can choose to share it into a public pool. If there’s a site you never want to have recorded, even in the private mode, you can block it entirely. If you do let something slip by, you can go back and delete it from your history.
The site is well done, with a clean UI and some nice graphics. By default, the site will present your recorded browsing history in a donut shape, with each site visited represented by a colored band. The shape and position of these bands is meant to recall a standard clock face — the length and position of a band corresponds to the time you visited a site. Along with your browser history, you can also import your Tweets and songs played on last.fm which are displayed as parallel bands. It’s fun to play around with, but you can also switch into a more standard list view if you’d like. Also worth pointing out: CEO Alex Huf says that everything on the site was built with touch screens in mind, so the site should play nice with whatever tablet devices are on the horizon.
Nebul.us seems to have two main uses: it can used as both a social site for sharing content with your friends (and to the public, if you’d like), or as a productivity site for figuring out how you’re spending your time online. In the former case, which pits the site against the likes of Digg and Delicious, Nebul.us users effectively vote on their favorite articles not with sharing buttons, but by voting with their browsers themselves. In the latter case Nebul.us goes against services like RescueTime.
It’s nice the Nebul.us has two very different use cases, but I’m concerned it may prove difficult to explain them both to new users who stumble across the site (frankly I was pretty confused at first). Still, Nebul.us is still is fairly early stages so they have plenty of time to figure out how to balance the two. A harder challenge may lie in convincing people to actually share their browser history in the first place: no matter how many security and privacy features Nebul.us offers, putting that data in the cloud is going to be enough to scare off a significant number of potential users.
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A Verizon commercial depicts the dismal extent of AT&T's 3G coverage. AT&T is suing, claiming the map confuses customers. [Engadget]
Ack! Talk about bad timing. T-Mobile is just barely off the grill for their guilt-by-association connection with the Great Danger/Sidekick outage of 2009, and now they’re right back in the network-outage spotlight.
This time around, it appears that it’s their entire network – or at least, a big ol’ chunk of it – that has gone down. Voice and data are both coming up empty, Twitter is on fire with complaints, and T-Mobile has confirmed that they’re aware of the issues and have got engineers cracking away as we speak.
Tmo’s Statement on the matter:
All – We’re aware of the current service disruption. Our rapid response teams have been mobilized to restore service as quickly as possible. We will provide further updates as more information is available.
Rapid response team, eh? I’m imagining a band of men wearing pink berets, repelling onto cell towers out of a helicopter piloted by Catherine Zeta Jones.
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A hacker on Monday annoyed several Dutch iPhone owners by sending an unremovable warning message stating their phones had been hacked. He offered instructions to remove the hack in exchange for a meager ransom of €5 ($7).
Displayed in the screenshot to the right, the hacker’s security message contained a URL directing iPhone owners to send money to a PayPal account. The directions have since been removed, as the site appears to have been reported to the internet service provider.
The exploit only worked against jailbroken iPhones. Many iPhone owners who jailbreak their handsets perform a common procedure called enabling SSH in order to execute UNIX commands on the device. iPhones have a default root password that many forget to change, and the hacker was able to scan for iPhones on the T-Mobile Netherlands network running SSH and then gain access by entering the default password, Ars Technica’s Chris Foresman explained.
Clever trick, and it appears the hacker pulled this stunt mostly to show off. He’s since apologized for asking for money and posted instructions for undoing the hack.
See Also:
Dutch hacker holds jailbroken iPhones “hostage” for €5 (Updated) [ArsTechnica]
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
We love apps on the iPhone. Lurve them. They are capable of keeping track of your budget, translating foreign languages and even delivering ample doses of cow bell. But we can’t give every app out there a ringing endorsement. More than a few stinkers don’t work as promised, are endlessly confusing or are horrifically expensive. The latter group is what we’ve got in our crosshairs today.
These get our vote for the top 13 overpriced iPhone apps. While some are fairly useful (Wolfram Alpha, we’re looking at you) others make about as much sense as a Faberge hackey sack. (A special thanks to Krapps, the iPhone-app review site, for a few contributions to this list!)
Rock BandPrice: $10 game, $1 for every two extra songs
What it purportedly does: The underwhelming iPhone version of Rock Band costs $10, includes only 20 songs to start and then asks you to spend even more in the Music Store after you’re thoroughly bored by the initial offerings. Plus, do you know how hard it is to rock a guitar solo on an iPhone’s tiny screen? You’d be better off spending your money on a tiny garage-sale ukulele.
Download [iTunes]
Price: $50
What it purportedly does: To its credit, the app is actually pretty awesome. It displays all Wolfram Alpha answers (text or GIFs) and either wraps or scales them to the iPhone’s screen. There’s even a special virtual keypad that provides quick access to symbols commonly used by Wolfram junkies. But 50 dollars? Gee whillikers, Professor, you could buy a decent graphing calculator for that much cash, and use Google to answer all your other questions for free.
Download [iTunes]
Price: $50
What it purportedly does: Turns your iPhone into a universal remote for controlling not only your A/V equipment but also lighting and security systems. Provided all that equipment is made by Rosie’s parent company, Savant Systems.
Download [iTunes]
The Sushi ExperiencePrice: $70
What it purportedly does: It’s a book that educates you on the history of sushi — and how to make delicious rolls. But shouldn’t e-books be, uh, cheaper than print books? Digital distribution costs next to nothing after all. For $70, we’d want the app to make sushi for you.
Download [iTunes]
Price: $90
What it purportedly does: The virtual cow-tipping game was initially $1, but the developer probably raised the price to $100 after the app didn’t sell. Now, all the developer has to do is pray for some drunken frat boy to accidentally tap the Buy Now button. Good luck!
Download [iTunes]
Price: $100
What it purportedly does: Nothing. Except part an idiot from his money, much like its predecessor, the $1,000 “I Am Rich” app.
Download [iTunes]
Price: $100
What it purportedly does: Voice-guided, turn-by-turn, GPS navigation. But more often it suffers from “poor GPS connection” and thinks you’re cruising through a forest when you’re actually stuck in rush-hour traffic. If you want a perfect GPS experience, the company recommends purchasing a separate car mount for an additional $120, making a total of $220 you’re burning on spotty GPS navigation. If you’re willing to spend that much on navigation, you might as well pick up a standalone GPS — or if you’re at the end of a contract, switch to a $200 Motorola Droid that features rich, detailed maps and turn-by-turn directions that are never confusing.
Download [iTunes]
Price: $180
What it purportedly does: Intended for professional level studio people, XA1 soaks up audio via the iPhone’s microphone and then displays it as a visual graph of the audio spectrum. While the app does offer some very cool and very geeky features, we’re wondering who would buy this. Wouldn’t you be better served by actual in-studio equipment?
Download [iTunes]
iDcrmPrice: $200
What it purportedly does: A full version of Microsoft’s titanic business program, Dynamics CRM, optimized for the iPhone. Two hundred bucks is a lot, yes. But chances are the accounts payable department will be signing off on this one, not you.
Download [iTunes]
Price: $450
What it purportedly does: From its description on the App Store, it seems to be a program for accessing accounting and financial information from Microsoft Dynamics GP financial system. We’re not sure if you should necessarily be in business if you’re spending nearly $500 on a mobile app. But hey, it’s financial wizards, not Wired editors, who got rich while bringing you the mortgage meltdown and the near-collapse of the U.S. economy. Maybe we’re just not the target audience.
Download [iTunes]
Price: Free! Oh wait … you need a $500 accessory to make it work.
What it purportedly does: The $500 accessory in question hooks into to your car’s ignition and lets you switch your vehicle on from your iPhone. Hey, it’s perfect for impressing the bridge and tunnel crowd.
Download [iTunes]
iRa ProPrice: $900
What it purportedly does: Got an insanely expensive array of surveillance cameras? iRa Pro lets you watch live video feeds and manipulate camera angles through a swipe of the finger. A must-have for the fortresses of hyper-paranoid supervillains.
Download [iTunes]
Price: $1,000
Download [iTunes]
See Also:
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
When the iPhone OS 3.1 update rolled through town, it brought with it a handful of new features – but it also killed off one, not-so-official feature: unauthorized data tethering on AT&T.
Early this morning, the endlessly ingenious iPhone hacking community released Blacksn0w, a carrier unlock for the iPhone 3G and 3GS. Even if you have no need to plug in a different SIM card than what was originally intended, however, Blacksn0w still has its perks. Namely, it brings the aforementioned unauthorized data tethering right on back.
We’ve just walked through the process, and it went off without a hitch. If you’re interested in doing the same but don’t want to do it alone, we’ve thrown together a handy step-by-step guide, just for you.
Disclaimer: We are not your mom. We are also not the ones who made any of this stuff, nor do we recommend doing it. There have been reports of this process bricking (read: breaking) phones, though it seems to work just fine for everyone we’ve talked to. If your iPhone breaks, melts, or runs away, or if AT&T somehow figures out you’re tethering and charges you a million dollars per megabyte, it’s not our fault.
We’re seeing some reports on Twitter that some users are having issues with WiFi, GPS, or YouTube after unlocking with Blacksn0w. If you have any such issues, go to Settings > General > Reset> and hit “Reset Network Settings”. Once that’s complete, do a hard power cycle by holding the sleep/home button for a few seconds and then sliding the on-screen power toggle.
With that out of the way, lets begin. The entire process is drop dead simple, and should take roughly 10 minutes. This should work on both Windows and OS X. The steps below assume that you have not yet jailbroken your iPhone, and will walk you through that process.
From here, tethering is a matter of following the on-screen instructions. Enjoy your jailbroken, tetherable iPhone 3G/3GS on OS 3.1/3.1.2! If you’ve gotten this far, we’d recommend installing Cydia (just open up blackra1n and tap the Cydia label). You should also consider allowing Cydia to record the signature hashes of your device once installed; be it that Apple patches this exploit in the next release, you’ll most likely need those to get back to a jailbroken state.
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 CBS News | Lawsuit Would Pull B&N Nook E-Reader From Market PC Magazine The California-based company suing Barnes & Noble over its e-reader wants the court to stop the sale of the Nook, according to court documents made public Tuesday. Spring Design on Monday said it was suing Barnes & Noble for ... Spring Design seeks injunction barring Nook sales UPDATE 1-Barnes & Noble sued by eReader maker Spring Design Barnes & Noble nobbled for 'nicking' Nook-e Reader notion |
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Good news, everyone! As you may have heard by now, the iPhone 3GS and 3G are now fully carrier-unlockable thanks to blacksn0w – but that’s not all!
In addition to making your iPhone carriers SIM card slot play friendly with just about any SIM you can cram in there, blacksn0w also undoes some of the locks put in place by Apple/AT&T during the upgrade to 3.1. Namely, it removes the IPCC lock which prevented tethering.
I just got my iPhone up and tethering in all of a few minutes – we’ll have a tutorial up in just a bit.
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The Malwarebytes Corporation, makers of the excellent anti-malware software of the same name, have discovered that a Chinese rival has been stealing from its database of malware samples and flagging a specific keygen code for the Malwarebytes software using the exact same naming scheme. When Malwarebytes confronted the vendor, IObit, about the theft, the company denied it and claimed it was just a technical glitch and that Malwarebytes was being malicious by spreading rumors. However MB ran a test on the shady software, called Security 360, by adding definitions for a fake rogue anti-virus program to its data base. Security 360 almost immediately added the fake definitions to its own database and used an almost identical naming scheme.
“So we dug further. We accumulated more similar evidence for other detections, and we soon became convinced that this was not a mistake, it was not a coincidence, it was not an isolated event, and it persisted presently in their current database. They are using both our database and our database format exactly.” The company reported in a blog post. “During the course of our investigation, we uncovered additional evidence that IObit may have stolen the proprietary databases of other security vendors as well. We are in the process of contacting these vendors.”
Malwarebytes intends to pursue legal action against IObit. This incident is a good reminder to always stick with well known security apps like MalwareBytes, Spybot Search and Destroy, AVG, AdAware and others. Never download a security app you’ve never hear of or one you see advertised in a pop up or spam message.
Malwarebytes is one of the best anti-malware apps around. It’s fast, easy to use, powerful and doesn’t hog system resources. It supports multi-drive scanning which includes networked drives. There is a free version available but for real-time protection (which prevents malware infections from ever happening) and the ability to schedule regular scans, spring for the paid version, which is just $24.95. The protection and piece of mind are worth it!
Full Story » | Written by Sue Walsh for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 San Francisco Chronicle | TwitterPeek: The Twitter-Only Gadget Destined for Extinction PC World Okay, okay...I'll set my 50s-style faux-enthusiasm aside for a moment to explain. A company called Peek has just announced a new gizmo known as the TwitterPeek. The device lets you read and write tweets on the go, and -- well, that's actually it. ... What, exactly, is the Twitter Peek? Our first hands-on Tweet Tweet, its TwitterPeek Do you really want to carry another device just for Twitter? |
The RevolveR notebook uses a design similar to a cloth Jacob's Ladder toy to create a journal with "floating" bindings, so that you can turn it inside-out.
(via Making Light)
FROM GAMERTELL - The most recent Aldi ad states you can get a Wii with four games (Big League Sports, Carnival Mini Golf, Game Party and Sonic and the Black Knight) for $249.99.
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Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 The Money Times | Best Buy Movie Downloads: Is the Death of the DVD Nigh? PC World The announcement that Best Buy is teaming with CinemaNow on movie downloads is yet another sign that DVDs are plummeting fast into a steep downward trajectory. As my PC World colleague Daniel Ionescu pointed out today, Best Buy, the leading retail ... UPDATE 2-Best Buy plans movie download service with Sonic CinemaNow streaming movies coming to Best Buy Best Buy launching digital movie service with CinemaNow |
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Here's a sweet bus-shelter made out of a bus -- the irony is that the bus that stops here is made out of a bus-shelter.
Dumping auto waste or old auto parts is one of the major problems for most nations across the world. Resurrecting old school buses, sculptor and designer Christopher Fennell has devised a bus shelter that not only looks unique but also helps in reducing the huge piles of auto waste. Made of selective parts and pieces from three iconic school buses, from the years '62, '72 and '77, and old city line seats, the yellow bus shelter is a unique way to attract people toward recycling and adopting a green lifestyle. Check out the video after the jump.
Decomposed school buses resurrected for bus shelter
(via Cribcandy)
 Soft Sailor | UPDATE 2-AT&T sues Verizon Wireless over 3G ads Reuters NEW YORK, Nov 3 (Reuters) - AT&T Inc (TN) is suing Verizon Wireless in an effort to stop its bigger mobile rival from using "misleading" coverage maps in advertisements that AT&T says are causing it to lose "incalculable market share. ... AT&T Sues Verizon Over `There's A Map For That' Ads Verizon sued by AT&T over “misleading” 3G adverts AT&T sues Verizon over TV ads |
The Spirit of Berlin is an iPhone-operated Dodge minivan. Researchers from the Freie Universität Berlin's Artificial Intelligence Group hacked the van to be semi-autonomous for DARPA's 2007 Urban Grand Challenge. Now Appirion UG, a mobile app development firm spun out of the AI Group, built an iPhone app to remote control the van. No idea why it's a Dodge and not, say, a Mercedes. You can see a slideshow of the project over at Life. Or watch a video after the jump!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Whenever you hear about bugs and exploits being discovered in the iPhone’s browser, Safari, it’s usually the doings of some masterful meddler who devoted hours to unearthing any flaws they could find — not some user casually tapping around the application. Apple’s pretty good at keeping things locked down, and the iPhone’s got enough users that most of the nasty user-facing bugs have been flushed out. Well, except for this new one.
It’s not an incredibly common bug, and it doesn’t seem likely that it would hit most users – but for the iPhone users this newly discovered bug does affect, it could mean huge operator fees.
The flaw, as discovered by Estonian Apple Site AppleSpot: If the user visits a site which uses Motion-JPEG (most commonly used for security cams and live feeds) in Safari, Safari will continue to gobble up bandwidth even after Safari is closed. Safari is one of the few apps that Apple allows to process in the background, and Motion-JPEG streams appear to continue streaming, even if the stream is in another tab or in the “closed” application. Apple gives no indication that Safari will continue to stream – and considering that most applications on the platform aren’t granted such privileges, it’s unlikely that a lay user would understand the consequences.
As mentioned, this bug certainly isn’t one that springs up all that regularly; for it to affect you, you need to not only visit one of these Motion-JPEG streams in Safari, but also be on some sort of pay-per-megabyte plan. While it’s no sweat off the backs of anyone on an unlimited package (as is the case with a vast majority of US iPhone users), it could work out to MASSIVE wallet damage for anyone traveling internationally or who are signed up on carriers that only offer metered data.
The original discoverers of the bug claim to have been able to rack up over 740 megabytes in silently streamed data during one hour of testing. If the same thing had happened to someone without a data package, they say that one hour of unintentional data usage would have worked out to roughly 30,000 Estonian kroons in fees – or just shy of $3,000 dollars. Ouch.
[Thanks Ronald!]
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Section: Communications, Cellphones, Email / IM, Smartphones
Here in the US, Sony Ericsson isn’t high on my list of phones to check out. Primarily, their inexpensive phones make the trip across the pond and the American public has yet to really embrace them as a quality brand. That may change with the new XPERIA X10 which is due to become a flagship Android phone for the brand. All isn’t perfect yet, though.
Slashgear was received by Sony Ericsson and shown the ropes of this phone due in Q1 of 2010. There is much to brag about, from the custom UI skin that overlays Android 1.6 (that was something to brag about up until last month, now it seems a bit dated with 2.0 in the wild - no word if the X10 will get the update), an 8.1 megapixel camera, a snappy 1 GHz Snapdragon chipset, and a 480x854 capacitive touchscreen.
What is most interesting about the device are it’s two customized apps by Sony Ericsson: Timescape and Mediascape. As described by Slashgear:
Timescape handles events, with a single view of tumbling panes each detailing the most recent changes, updates or events. SMS or email messages, calls, voicemails, photos, Twitter or Facebook updates and calendar entries are all pulled together into one dangling stream, and you can tap each pane to see it completely; hitting the Infinity symbol in the top corner then pulls together related information from all across the phone and online.
Mediascape, meanwhile, works in a similar way to Timescape but for audio, video and still image content. Three tabs show photos, audio and video, with the top half of the screen having draggable bars showing local content (split into rows by most recent, most played, etc.) while the lower half has online content. Sony Ericsson are working with content providers and carriers to develop this latter content; right now, the XPERIA X10 has access to YouTube video and online galleries, but there’s the potential for carrier-provided streaming music, PlayStation Network integration or third-party services. We’d particularly like to see Spotify integration too.
It was clear the demo Slashgear got was on an unoptomized software so the apps were sluggish to respond. One of the fun things about Android is the manufacturers ability to create a branded feel of the OS by using skins. It looks like Sony Ericsson may be onto something here and offered more Android phones would follow in 2010.
Read: [Slashgear]
Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Disposable cameras have been around for quite some time now. So why not disposable laptops? That's the question designer Je Sung Park is asking with the Recyclable Paper Laptop, which he imagines could be layers of materials and chips that can be easily replaced. It seems like a long shot (or does it?), but I'm digging its brown paper look.
Yanko Design has a few more images of this proposed design.
Gameloft, one of the world’s largest mobile gaming development houses, has just released their numbers for the third quarter of 2009.
In the first three quarters of 2009, Gameloft has already slung $132.3 million in mobile applications. This is up roughly 18% percent from the same time period last year, during which they brought in roughly $112.2 million.
$44.2 million of this year’s sales came from the third quarter alone, as compared to $38.5 million in the same quarter of last year. Year-over-year, Gameloft saw a 15% growth in their third quarter sales.
In the announcement, Gameloft indicated that much of their revenue stemmed from Apple’s App Store, though they didn’t disclose exactly how much.
In a separate announcement, the company also announced that they’ve signed new operator distribution agreements with 10 operators in Southeast Asia, and 9 in the Middle East.
![Screen shot 2009-11-03 at [ November 3 ] 11.05.24 AM](http://www.mobilecrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Screen-shot-2009-11-03-at-November-3-11.05.24-AM-630x196.png "Screen shot 2009-11-03 at [ November 3 ] 11.05.24 AM")
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We BLOOP dig BeeJive on the iPhone. What we BLOOP don’t dig is getting a pop-up push BLOOP notification every 3 seconds just because some of our friends like to type in fragments rather BLOOP than sentences.
Fortunately, BeeJive has recently added a new setting which lets you tweak the behavior of push notifications to be far, far less annoying. The wording they chose to tuck it behind doesn’t make things completely obvious, but it makes a world of difference.
With this setting, you’ll only receive one pop-up notification for each sender. For example: If Joe sends you a message and you don’t check it, you’ll see a pop-up alert. If he sends you 10 more messages, you won’t see 10 more pop-ups – but you will hear the alert sounds. If another friend comes up and sends you a message, however, you’ll get a pop-up alert. You still get pop-up alerts, you just don’t get hammered to death whenever someone sends you a string of IMs when you’re just trying to play some damn Tower Defense.
To find the settings:
While you’re in there, you ought to set Session Timeout up to something higher than the default of 1 hour as well.
Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
Section: Business News, Gadgets / Other, Miscellaneous
Kmart’s Black Friday flyer was released today on the Black Friday.info website and it seems to have a few good deals and doorbusters for those looking to get some great prices on their gadgets for Christmas. Kmart will open its doors at 6 am on Black Friday.
For five hours only, you can buy the Magellan Roadmate 1220 for the low price of $84.99. The TomTom XL32SS will be on sale for $99.99 on both Friday and Saturday. Other 6 am to 11 am doorbuster deals include the Delstar 7 inch wireless netbook for $119.99 and a Sylvania portable DVD player for $49.99. If you are a fan of Cobra products, one of their radar detectors and two way radios are priced at fifty percent off.
If you know anyone that wants a small 2 GB stick mp3 player that holds about 1000 songs, you can pick one up on Black Friday for only $9.99. Get $50 in store savings on the Samsung SL40 digital camera and pay only $79.99. The Panasonic Class 42 inch plasma television is being sold for $549 while the Magnavox DVD/VCR combo is priced at just $49.99.
Read [Black Friday.info]
Full Story » | Written by Heather Wood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Before we’ve even had time to get sick of the new iPhone 3GS, hints of a fourth-generation iPhone have already surfaced on the web.
Chinese wholesaler China Ontrade has posted a part listing, accompanied with a photo, that it claims is the fourth-generation iPhone’s midboard. But given the timing of this listing, Wired.com doubts the authenticity of the part. Rather than an actual Apple component, this is probably China Ontrade’s marketing gimmick to attract iPhone counterfeiters looking to make the next iPhone knockoff.
It’s worth noting, as Gizmodo has pointed out, that China Ontrade earlier this year leaked photos claiming to be parts for the third-generation iPhone, which were confirmed to be the real thing when the iPhone 3GS was disassembled.
But why so soon? Apple has released each of its iPhones in the summertime, so a fourth-generation iPhone shouldn’t hit stores until June or July of 2010. Thus, it’s questionable why a part would be produced for the next iPhone so far in advance: Manufacturers traditionally order parts at the last minute to avoid stock congestion or last-minute changes, Gizmodo points out. Gizmodo also speculates there’s a slight possibility Apple could be rushing out the next iPhone to compete with the increasing number of Android phones on the market.
Still, Apple would not be pleased if a partner leaked parts giving away hints of any of its future products. (Why would Apple continue to work with China Ontrade if it leaked third-generation iPhone parts?) A more logical inference is that China Ontrade is most likely using its proven “track record” for leaking images of the iPhone 3GS parts to gain attention in the press, and thus attract producers of Chinese knockoffs to buy this new part.
The marketing angle is such: “You could produce the ‘fourth-generation iPhone’ before Apple!” In the next few months, expect boxes labeled “iPhone 4G” to appear on shelves in Chinese electronic stores.
What do you gather from the part listing? Add your thoughts in the comments below.
Product Page [China Ontrade via Gizmodo]
See Also:
Photo: China Ontrade
FROM GAMERTELL - The 2009 Toys ‘R Us Big Toy Book ad, which was available in the Sunday, November 1, 2009 paper and can also be viewed on Facebook or your iPhone, features four DS bundle deals. It also offers a $10 gift card with a purchase over $75.
MORE »
Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Tethering has always been great for the consumers and bad for the companies – ostensibly because it overloads the bandwidth but really because most tethering has been done under the radar by hax0rs and it essentially circumvents the limitation of bandwidth providers put on there in the first place.
Well, Sprint is officially outlawing it on their Android phones and, as we know, once it’s outlawed, only outlaws will tether. Not quite sure how they’ll control it but clearly they’ll be watching throughput to confirm you’re not stealing bits.
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Not that this should surprise anyone, but Apple has sold only 5,000 iPhones since last week when it officially launched. The phrase “officially launched” is key, since people there have been able to buy the iPhone on the gray market for some time now. And it’s a superior phone on the grey market, since the official phone doesn’t have Wi-Fi. That’s right: a smartphone nearly in 2010 that doesn’t have Wi-Fi.
The phone isn’t particularly expensive, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that China Unicom and Apple have released a crippled version of a phone that had already been widely available.
Who’s gonna buy that? Apparently very few people!
Someone, and I don’t know who, expects Apple to sell as much as 460,000 official iPhone in China per year. Keep in mind that that’s still less than the number of grey market phones, so all of this is sorta silly.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile, Features, Originals
The successful launch of the Palm Pre, Palm’s darling of a phone running the “revolutionary” webOS was supposed to save Palm. Launched on June 6 in the US, the Pre was off to a fast start, depending on who you asked. The Pre continues to be sold on one network, Sprint, while it’s application catalog fills out. The question now becomes, did the Pre save Palm?
That was the question poised to me by our Robert Nelson who was standing next to me when the phone was announced at CES last year. Both of us left with a sense of hope and excitement about the new phone and about the webOS. Where are we now?
Robert says, “To me, I think it has gone stale. It almost seems that Palm is back on life support. But at the same time, I like the Pre (of course, that could just be the fan boy in me).”
My take is two parts: I agree with Robert the gloss has faded a bit on the Pre. I attribute that to an unappealing design, at least for me. I am edging closer to despising key’d phones, the split second it takes to slide out the keypad or worse, reorient the device is far too long for me. The Pre doesn’t live on the now network, it lives on the, wait for it, slide out, network.
So it’s clear I am not a big fan of the hardware on the Pre. That’s a personal call and one that I may be on my own with it; I can deal with that. I have the same problems with the Moto Droid and the slew of Android phones with slide out full-size keyboards. A phone store clerk explained it to me like this: the teens and 20 year olds love the slide out, the 30 and up crowd digs the slider phones. Test that one out, I’ve found it to be a decent predictor.
Part two is this, while the Pre hasn’t saved Palm, the webOS will. The OS is fun, simple, brilliant in some ways. I think the Pixi will do well, assuming it gets off Sprint in record time. I think the phone after Pixi will do even better. There is much competing operating systems could learn from webOS. While it still could use some polishing around the edges, it works and works well.
There is no question in my mind that the webOS can compete with Android for most people. Competing with the iPhone OS isn’t the problem, it’s the Santa’s sack of apps that is getting harder to get around.
What is your take, did the Pre do enough good for Palm?
Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
I love Nintendo, and I especially love Nintendo games. This is why I hope that one day, the Gameboy line (of which the DS is surely a part, despite the name) will die. Why? Because then the big N, like Sega before it, will sell its real talent - the software - to other console makers. This is a roundabout way to say that I want Super Mario World on my iPod Touch.
This is unlikely to happen for a while, but owners of the latest and fastest (and jailbroken) iPhones and iPod Touches will soon be able to play N64 titles on their devices. ZodTTD, previously seen here on the Lab for his VLC port to the iPhone, promises to follow his GBA emulator with the rather juicier home console, which was home to the fair MarioKart 64 and the awesome, time-sucking GoldenEye. ZodTTD says that, because of the new hardware graphics accelerators inside the iPhone 3GS and the bigger of the new iPod Touches, they should be able to handle most, if not all, game ROMs from the N64.
Rightly, though, ZodTTD is worried about handling the huge number of buttons on the N64 controller, which were very intuitive in 3D hardware but almost impossible to translate to a touch-screen:
I’m somewhat light on details at the moment due to wanting to balance the hype. Things look good for this project though. Only thing I’m concerned about is currently software based controls. I would like to keep my current software based controls with overlays in use, if possible.
One day, we may be able to buy these games direct from the App Store. Until then, it’s just a jailbreak (and a short wait) away.
Did he say N64?! For the iPhone and iPT3G!? [ZodTTD via All Tech Related]
Photo illustration: Charlie Sorrel
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Email / IM, Smartphones, Mobile
We knew it was too good to be true. We knew Verizon couldn’t keep it’s mitts off the phone and tweak something to make it less fun. The good news is unlike most of Verizon’s disabled phone, this one can be fixed by throwing money at it. $15 per month to be exact.
Thanks to the geniuses at Verizon, if you wish to access Exchange mail on your Droid phone you’ll need to cough up another $15 per month. This is the case for accessing work email on a Microsoft Exchange server as well as accessing GMail via the Exchange platform. If this seems a bit harsh to you, you’re spot-on.
Verizon’s response to criticism on this is to point out Droid is designed as a non-corporate phone. A consumer oriented phone like this, isn’t expected to go into Exchange servers, or so the thinking goes. Tilting the phone as a non-business phone is odd to me. Horse hockey is what I say.
From InfoWorld: “Verizon offers three data plans for Droid customers: $30 month on top of your voice plan’s rate for non-Exchange usage, $45 per month on top of your voice plan’s rate for Exchange usage, and $50 per month total cost for a data-only plan (whether or not you use it to access Exchange). Verizon spokeswoman Brenda Raney notes that the requirement to get the $45 “smartphone plan” for corporate e-mail usage applies to any smartphone, such as the BlackBerry—not just to the Droid.”
Contrast that with AT&T’s iPhone and BlackBerry smartphone plan that adds $30 on top of voice and includes Exchange access. AT&T does have a business plan that mirrors Verizon’s at $45 per month.
While realizing it’s tough being a carrier these days, profiling data is a bad idea. Data costs the same whether it is a movie streaming, Exchange email or surfing the net. Verizon should not penalize users based on what data they consume. Maybe, it’s just $15 a month but it bugs me. How about you?
Read: [InfoWorld]
Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
FROM APPLETELL - Apple has been pitching a $30 per month TV subscription service via iTunes to rival the way we’ve accessed our TV through cable for years now.
MORE »
Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Sony Ericsson’s first Android cellphone says hello today, and it looks to be a somewhat dull device. The Xperia X10, if the advert is to be believed, is aimed at girls who like cappuccino and dancing around in clothes shops. It is also a rather huge and clunky looking handset.
The X10 will go on sale early next year “packs” features into its utilitarian exterior. There is a sure-to-be-great 8.1 megapixel camera with a 16x digital zoom and face recognition, a four-inch, 480 x 854 pixel OLED touch screen and, thank you Sony Ericsson, a proper 3.5mm headphone jack. Add to that an 8GB microSD card and Qualcomm’s 1GHz Snapdragon chip and you’re at the end of the spec sheet. Everything else is software, and Sony Ericsson has skinned Android with its own UX “platform” which will confusingly be rolled out in different guises across a range of devices.
The price is undecided, but the colors are already finalized: Sensuous Black and Luster White. Yummy. Pass the cappuccino.
Product page [Sony Ericsson. Thanks, John!]
Section: Gadgets / Other, ebooks
Looking at the above image it is hard not to see the similarities between the Barnes & Noble Nook and the other ebook reader which comes courtesy of Spring Design. That other ebook reader is called the Alex reader, and although many initially thought it was a copycat of the Nook, it seems that is the opposite. Based on a recent press release, Spring Design, on behalf of the Alex reader have filed an intellectual property lawsuit against Barnes & Noble and the Nook.
The suit is claiming that “Barnes & Noble misappropriated trade secrets and violated the parties’ non-disclosure agreement when it copied Alex’ features into its recently announced Nook e-book.”
“Spring Design unfortunately had to take the appropriate action to protect its intellectual property rights,” said Spring Design Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Eric Kmiec. “We showed the Alex e-book design to Barnes & Noble in good faith with the intention of working together to provide a superior dual screen e-book to the market.”
Otherwise the details of the lawsuit are pretty light at this point, but I am sure this is not the last we will hear of this story. It should be interesting to see what the outcome will bring, but either way it should mean some good press for both readers alike. That said, despite look, the Barnes & Noble Nook does have one nice feature that the Alex reader does not. The Nook already has a built-in book store, where the Alex reader was noted as being in discussion “and enlisting major content partners.”
Read [Business Wire]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Section: Communications, Accessories, Cellphones, Email / IM, Smartphones, Mobile, Computers, Netbooks
Redfly makes a small, instant on netbook-size device that brings your small phone screen to a bigger screen complete with larger keyboard. Redfly has worked with Windows Mobile phones for some time and now the company announces BlackBerry support. For users that needs more than the small keyboard and screen a phone offers, this could be a life-saver.
Available in both 7” and 8” models, the Redfly connects to your WinMo or BB smartphone allowing you to bang out emails even faster. Browsing the web is also possible, though reviewers were not so happy with the results. Redfly can be used with the BlackBerry Bold 9000, BlackBerry Curve 8900 and BlackBerry Tour 9630.
We’d suggest this device for those who travel often and could use just a little more space. We’d love the device to be a lot thinner (think Macbook Air thin) a bigger keyboard and a bit more upscale look. If you are going after business class, you can’t look like economy. That’s just my opinion though.
There is a contingent that believes this is the wave of the future. Palm thought this but was ahead of the curve and pulled the program before launching. As our phones become more powerful and capable, connecting to them seems logical. To get on the wave, you’ll need $200 or $250 for the 7” and 8” respectively. Or you can try to win one from Crackberry here.
Read: [Brighthand]
Image credit: Brighthand
Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
It would be a little odd to review a product that has been around for 110 years, so we won’t. I have noticed, though, that whenever I stop and talk to other cyclists, they almost always ask about my Brooks Saddle, especially the few-months-old B17 I have on my fixed-gear bike (my other city-bike came with a twenty-something year old Brooks already attached). These English Bicycle saddles, hand made by the recently-independent company (it was owned by Raleigh Bikes since 1962) are both feared and revered due to the high price tag and the old-school style. So instead of a review, I’ll answer the questions that come up most often about these legendary bike seats.
How much is it?
Expensive, if measured in money alone, and dirt-cheap if measured in value. My basic B-17, the springless leather and steel flagship model, is listed at $120 in the US, and that’s the cheap one. It is, however, the only seat you’ll ever need to buy. If looked after, it should last longer than you, which makes it much more of a bargain than dropping $30 a year on some cheap plastic junk.
How long does it take to break in?
It depends. This particular B17 is the “standard”, and therefore has the hardest leather (there are pre-aged versions but the treatment makes the leather weaker). For me, it was comfortable from the moment I mounted it, although it took a few weeks of hard riding to get the thing to start changing shape. The ‘sit bones’ eventually make depressions in the seat, keeping your butt in place and making the seat feel softer, even though it isn’t.
Others report breaking-in periods of several hundred miles, and there is a magic lotion available from Brooks which can be applied to help soften the leather quicker. But don’t bother. The seats, even the ones without springs, are comfy from day one.
It’s very hard. Is it comfortable?
Surprisingly, it is comfortable because it is so hard. Instead of filling all your crevices with gel pads, which effectively give many more points of friction and cause saddle sores, the Brooks saddles are effectively a very stiff hammock hung from each end. This provides a measure of shock absorbance, and as your rear-end really only presses at the two pressure points on your sit bones (where the pelvis touches the saddle), there is no rubbing. The shiny surface, too, helps stop chafing and even heavy cotton jeans have moisture wicked-away quickly by the leather.
In short, it might look uncomfortable, but it is in fact the most comfortable kind of seat you can buy. Don’t believe me? Here’s what Sheldon Brown had to say:
Plastic saddles have four advantages over leather ones:
They are lighter.
They are weatherproof.
They do not require breaking in.
They are cheaper.
Leather saddles have only one advantage over plastic, but it is a big one:
They are much more comfortable!
Why is it pointed up at the front?
Because you sit on the back, wide part of the seat, and that section is at an angle to the nose, you need to tilt the seat back a little farther than usual. If not, you’ll slide forward onto the nose and put pressure onto the soft tissues of what my brother calls the “biffing skin”. Tipping it up makes the rear section flat enough to sit on comfortably.
Did that (saddlebag) come with it?
No, and it cost another $100. It’s an expensive D-Shaped Tool Bag, but like the seat, I expect it to last forever. That and it looks good and holds my toolkit without reminding me it is there by swinging around under the saddle.
Aren’t there other brands that are just as good?
Perhaps. Once upon a time, all bike seats looked like this, but today Brooks is about the only brand that is easy to find new in pretty much any bike shop.
Anything else? I’m sure some of you use Brooks saddles, and love them or hate them. And I know for certain that our cyclist readers are our most vocal readers. Let us know what you think.
Product page [Brooks]
Photo credit: Charlie Sorrel
See Also:
Apart from the hideous Amazon leather case for my Kindle, which makes the device easier to hold. I don’t usually bother with protection of any kind. But if the sheer number of pitches I get for iPhone and iPod skins is an indicator, then they are certainly popular with the kids.
So for those who do use protection, these prophylactic stickers from iaPeel offer a notable twist on the tasteless swirly patterns that usually adorn these things: you can print your own nasty design onto the case before applying it to your iPod. The $21 kit comes with design software and five skins which can be run through a standard inkjet printer. A refill pack is available for $18. This means that you’re actually paying for software, the kind of nickel-and-dime move we despise.
The manufacturer says that this would make a great gift for “someone who’s just made the jump into the incredibly cool world of the iPhone.” We’d rather buy it ourselves, though, and make custom skins for our friends. The possibilities are endless: embarrassing baby photos. Embarrassing office party photos. Embarrassing shower… You get the point. Availabe now, for iPods Touch, Classic and Nano along with the “incredibly cool” iPhone.
Product page [iaPeel via Book of Joe]
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We already knew 
Tonight, Amazon sent an email to members of Amazon Associates letting them know about a new feature: Twitter integration. Basically, when you’re logged into your Associate account, you’ll see a new “Share on Twitter” button on your Site Stripe (a management toolbar along the top of the page). As you’d expect, clicking this button will prepare a tweet complete with a shortened URL to send out of all of your Twitter followers.
