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What Drugs Do Astronauts Take?astroengine writes "Science fiction is stuffed full of examples of pill-popping space explorers and aliens enjoying psychedelic highs. After all, space is big; it can get boring/scary/crazy up there. It's little wonder, then, that our current space explorers consume a cocktail of uppers, downers, tranquilizers and alcohol to get the job done. Robert Lamb on tranquilizers in the space station: 'Sure, it hardly makes for a civilized evening aboard ISS, but it beats someone blowing the hatch because they think they saw something crawling on one of the solar panels.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 5 Dec 2009 | 3:11 am Climate change protests ahead of Copenhagen summit - BBC News
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 5 Dec 2009 | 2:43 am New Aliens Vs. Predator Game Doesn't Make It Past AU Ratings BoardAn anonymous reader writes "Australia refused to give Rebellion's new Aliens Vs. Predator game a rating, effectively banning it in the country. Rebellion says it won't be submitting an edited version for another round of classifications, however. (As Valve did with Left 4 Dead 2.) They said, 'We will not be releasing a sanitized or cut down version for territories where adults are not considered by their governments to be able to make their own entertainment choices.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 5 Dec 2009 | 1:36 am Is the New Droid Ad Anti-Women and Anti-Gay or Just Plain Idiotic? Actually, All Three! [BoomTown]
What in the world can one make of the new ad for the Droid, the Motorola (MOT) smartphone with Google (GOOG) Android software on the Verizon Wireless (VZ) network, which apparently put out this commercial? Here’s what: It aggressively calls the Apple (AAPL) iPhone a dumb blonde and then a prissy dude in need of a beatdown. Let’s put it this way: The 30-second clip makes Glenn Beck look like Gloria Steinem and Ellen Degeneres combined! Earlier advertising for the Droid has been clearly aimed at the he-man demographic, with a beer-commercial tone and a growly-voiced announcer. So what? That’s marketing 101. But this one–titled “Pretty”–goes entirely too far. “Should a phone be pretty?” it begins, using an odd series of images that is packed full of random misogyny. “Should it be a tiara-wearing, digitally clueless beauty pageant queen?” Then come all the manly imagery–a racehorse, a powerfully pointed Scud missile, bananas and buzzsaws to represent the Droid. A surging missile, as well as several creamy explosions too. Get it? And let’s not forget the bunch of fey, effeminately-dressed mannequins, with one getting bashed with a ink-filled ball thrown by some tough masked thug with the line, “Is it a precious porcelain figurine of a phone?” Then back to anti-women name-calling, saying an iPhone is a “princess,” unlike the Droid, “a phone that trades hair-do for can-do.” It is true that sometime a phone ad is just a phone ad–but, in this case, sometimes it’s just appalling. It would be funny, if it weren’t so mean-spirited. But, please, you be the judge of the video of the television commercial, which is on Verizon Wireless’ YouTube site: Source: All Things Digital | 5 Dec 2009 | 1:24 am Daily Crunch: Wrapped In Sound Edition
Here are some interesting stories from yesterday: “A Parallel Image”: a novel way of transmitting a video signal
Source: CrunchGear | 5 Dec 2009 | 1:00 am Man Controls Cybernetic Hand With ThoughtsMaryBethP writes "Scientists in Italy announced Wednesday that Pierpaolo Petruzziello, a 26-year-old Italian who had lost his left forearm in a car accident, was successfully linked to an artificial limb that was controlled by electrodes implanted in his arm and connected to the median and ulnar nerves. He has learned to control the artificial limb with his mind. According to CNet, Petruzziello says he could feel sensations in it, as if the lost arm had grown back again. The BBC has a brief video showing the arm in operation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Gizmodo | 5 Dec 2009 | 12:00 am Stormtrooper ballerinaFrom the unfortunately named "Hot Chicks With Stormtroopers" site, this femtrooper ballerina. Femtrooper Friday 8/28/09 (via JWZ) Previously:Boing Boing: Che/Star Wars Stormtrooper shirt Storm Trooper...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 Dec 2009 | 11:56 pm Stormtrooper ballerina
From the unfortunately named "Hot Chicks With Stormtroopers" site, this femtrooper ballerina.
Femtrooper Friday 8/28/09 (via JWZ)
Previously:
 Source: Boing Boing | 4 Dec 2009 | 11:56 pm Zombie song name-checks Boing BoingAlexander Malloy from Golden Robot Army sez, "Golden Robot Army is a rock and roll band in Seattle that gives away its music for free and writes songs about schadenfreude guilt and homeless drunks and...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 Dec 2009 | 11:55 pm Zombie song name-checks Boing BoingAlexander Malloy from Golden Robot Army sez, "Golden Robot Army is a rock and roll band in Seattle that gives away its music for free and writes songs about schadenfreude guilt and homeless drunks and zombies. The band will be touring and filming a short film in Japan in March of 2010 (Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya)."Source: Boing Boing | 4 Dec 2009 | 11:55 pm Measuring the smell of old books to find candidates for preservationMatija Strlic and colleagues write in the ACS's Analytical Chemistry about "material degradomics," a techniques by which the odors emanating from old books are noninvasively analyzed to figure out which books are rotting and need preservation:'Smell of Old Books' Offers Clues to Help Preserve Them (Image: Books of the Past, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Lin Pernille ♥ Photography's photostream)
Previously:
Source: Boing Boing | 4 Dec 2009 | 11:52 pm Measuring the smell of old books to find candidates for preservationMatija Strlic and colleagues write in the ACS's Analytical Chemistry about "material degradomics," a techniques by which the odors emanating from old books are noninvasively analyzed to figure out which...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 Dec 2009 | 11:52 pm Are terms-of-service enforceable?The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Ed Bayley has written an excellent introductory white-paper on whether click-wrap, browse-wrap, and other online terms of service are enforceable: In other words,...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 Dec 2009 | 11:47 pm Are terms-of-service enforceable?The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Ed Bayley has written an excellent introductory white-paper on whether click-wrap, browse-wrap, and other online terms of service are enforceable:The Clicks That Bind: Ways Users "Agree" to Online Terms of Service
Previously:
Source: Boing Boing | 4 Dec 2009 | 11:47 pm Woman jailed, charged with felony camcordering after recording 4 mins of sister's birthday party in a movie theaterA woman who tried out her new pocket camera by video-recording a few minutes of her sister's surprise birthday party at a showing of "New Moon" has been charged with a felony -- "camcordering" a movie...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 Dec 2009 | 11:41 pm Woman jailed, charged with felony camcordering after recording 4 mins of sister's birthday party in a movie theater
A woman who tried out her new pocket camera by video-recording a few minutes of her sister's surprise birthday party at a showing of "New Moon" has been charged with a felony -- "camcordering" a movie.
Penalties for camcordering have been ratcheting higher and higher (and have been introduced in international treaty negotiations, as well as in bilateral trade agreements with the US, which demands that its trading partners imprison people operating video recorders in cinemas). But the actual incidence of camcordered pirate DVDs is declining relative to "screeners" and other leaks from the industry itself. The movie industry has turned into an alcoholic dad who beats up his family at the slightest transgression while ignoring his own gross failures -- blaming everything on external forces and refusing to confront its own problems. Meanwhile, 22-year-old Samantha Tumpach spent two nights in jail for recording her friends singing "Happy Birthday" at a movie theater, for capturing less than four minutes of a feature film. She is charged with a felony and if convicted, could lose the right to vote, to work with children, to hold office, and to partake in full civil life. And the movie industry's pitch to us remains, "Please stop pirating our discs, because if you don't stop, we may be driven out of business and then society would suffer from our absence." Charged With Felony After Taping 4 Minutes Of "New Moon" (Thanks, Blaire!)
(Image: Camcordering, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike photo from kowitz's photostream )
Previously:
Source: Boing Boing | 4 Dec 2009 | 11:41 pm Google buys online collaboration startup (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 4 Dec 2009 | 11:31 pm Emulating New Super Mario Bros. Wii At 1080pKingofGnG writes "An impressive confirmation of the Dolphin Wii emulator's capabilities comes from a YouTube video, which shows off recently-added video clips of New Super Mario Bros. Wii in full HD. It demonstrates the growing compatibility of Dolphin with the latest games published for the Nintendo console."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 4 Dec 2009 | 11:28 pm Map of Wikipedia article-density by nationHere's a fascinating heat map showing the number of geotagged Wikipedia articles by country. It's a map of the "known unknowns" -- areas where there are likely to be many articles still to write. Mapping...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 Dec 2009 | 11:25 pm Map of Wikipedia article-density by nation Here's a fascinating heat map showing the number of geotagged Wikipedia articles by country. It's a map of the "known unknowns" -- areas where there are likely to be many articles still to write. Mapping the Geographies of Wikipedia Content
Previously:
Source: Boing Boing | 4 Dec 2009 | 11:25 pm Apple Has Acquired Lala
This could be bad news for Lala users. It’s unlikely that the innovative deals negotiated by Lala will survive through the acquisition. For over a year, Lala users have been purchasing the rights to stream their music an unlimited number of times for ten cents per song. If the deals with the music labels go up in smoke, Lala may lose the right to stream those songs. In other words, all the money users have been spending on web songs may go down the drain. If the deals are nullified, hopefully Apple will renegotiate them to at least cover existing purchases until it releases its own streaming music service. We’ve reached out to Lala but have yet to hear back. Likewise, this may well affect the Lala music gifts that have been recently offered by Facebook, and it could also harm the Music OneBox service Google recently launched (though Google can still rely on MySpace/iLike for its song streams). Stone writes that Apple is interested in Lala because of its engineering talent and technology, and that it was Lala that initiated the discussions. From the Times:
The deal makes sense. It seems inevitable that Apple will eventually launch its own cloud-based streaming music service. And that’s exactly what Lala is — an iTunes in the cloud, with some interesting pricing mechanics. A few other interesting things to note. This acquisition comes a little more than a month after Lala was integrated into Google’s OneBox and Facebook’s gift store. Lala may well have been viewing these launches as last-chance efforts to find a path to profitability. Given these reports that Lala’s “prospects for turning a profit in the short term were dim”, it looks like those launches may not have gone as well as Lala hoped. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors 
Source: TechCrunch | 4 Dec 2009 | 11:16 pm Apple mute on Lala plans
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 ABC News | un Panel to Probe Claims on Manipulating Climate Data Wall Street Journal The head of a United Nations panel said it will investigate claims that scientists manipulated data about global warming, days before climate-change talks in Copenhagen. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate ... In e-mails, science of warming is hot debate Scientists Respond to "Climategate" E-Mail Controversy Global Warming: Bring It On! |
Good thing Oprah quit that show, because 4Chan pwned it. I think this happened a couple years ago, but I'm just now seeing the video. Sorry, I'm lame and slow. "His group has over nine thousand penises, and they're all raping children." (thanks, Sean Bonner!)
Update: Among the many remixes this spawned, Pedobear techno.
Source: Boing Boing | 4 Dec 2009 | 9:56 pm
 Canada.com | Apple Has Acquired Lala Washington Post Earlier today we covered rumors that Apple was in talks to acquire streaming music service Lala. Now New York Times tech reporter Brad Stone has tweeted that it's a done deal. He writes, "Apple has acquired digital music startup Lala. ... Apple Acquires Lala Media Apple reportedly buys Lala music service Sources: Apple wants technology from struggling Lala |
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
It has been a busy week for our former partners on the CrunchPad. The company has deleted their corporate blog, taken the time to hire a PR firm and schedule an event Monday morning to “give their side of the story.”
They still have not returned our calls or emails. But they have spoken to press, and say that their side of the story has two key elements. First, that none of this was a surprise and we knew they were likely to break ties with us. And second that TechCrunch hasn’t done anything to help build the CrunchPad and therefore has no rights to the device.
Both statements are completely untrue. Among other things, emails from Fusion Garage illustrate it.
We aren’t going to restate every detail of the story here, mostly because it’s not all that interesting. But I will give a few highlights. And I’ve embedded letters sent from our law firm below to Fusion Garage as well as the ODM manufacturer, Pegatron. There are lots more details included in those letters.
There is just no way to argue that TechCrunch is not the joint owner of all intellectual property of the CrunchPad, and outright owner of the CrunchPad trademark. The CEO of Fusion Garage has spent nearly six months this year working from Silicon Valley and our offices. Most of the Fusion Garage team has spent the last three months here working with our team on the project. And our key team members have spent time in Singapore working directly on the hardware and software that powers the device. Fusion Garage emails and their own blog, before it was deleted, acknowledge this. We have also spent considerable amounts of money creating the device, paying the vendor and other bills that Fusion Garage wasn’t able to.
What’s even more absurd is the idea that we somehow knew about Fusion Garage’s intentions to break off the partnership before a couple of days prior to the device launching. Until November 17 we had every reason to believe that Fusion Garage was our trusted ally in creating the CrunchPad. We received nearly daily emails confirming that everything was on track. Raising funding for the project was a goal but wouldn’t have been necessary for some time; besides, we had U.S. investors lined up and ready to put money into the venture. Fusion Garage admitted to us on November 18 that the news of them pulling out of the partnership was “out of the blue.” When the company makes statements otherwise, compare them to the email below:
There is quite simply no way we will allow this company to move forward on this project. The extent of their fraud is only now becoming clear to me. The audacity of their scheme is staggering. We believe that they engaged with us until the last possible moment to get press attention and access to our development resources and cash, and then walk away hoping that we’d do nothing.
Here are the letters sent by our lawyers both to Fusion Garage and Pegatron (who, it turns out, terminated their agreement with Fusion Garage in August, although Fusion Garage never told us and continued to pretend they were working together). We’ll likely move further updates on the lawsuits to our CrunchNotes blog.
ChengLtr –
2009-12-04 Letter to Rathakrishnan –
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
What you’re looking at is an installation by Gebhard Sengmüller called “A Parallel Image.” Technically, it’s art, but it’s more of an interesting deconstruction of technology than anything else. Instead of transmitting a video signal digitally via HDMI or VGA, this contraption does it in analog: 2500 photoconductors in an array, individually wired to 2500 bulbs on the other side. The result is that anything shone on one side appears on the other by a simple and entirely physical process.
It’s ridiculously inefficient in one way, yet almost as elegant as possible in another. And as you can imagine, it’s not very high resolution. 2500=50 x 50, so it’s got about the same amount of pixels as an area the size of a quarter on whatever screen you’re reading this on. Not something I’d want to read blogs with, but it does transmit that projector image pretty well.
[via Hack a Day]
By Drake Martinet, Intern, All Things Digital
A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.
This week: A virtual visit with, some questions for and a few pertinent stats about Matthew McNeely and Sprout, the build-it-yourself Flash tool that lets anyone create customized Web site widgets.
Who: Matthew McNeely
What: VP of Engineering, Sprout.
Why: Sprout is a Web-based, WYSIWYG Flash editor that allows individuals and businesses to build customized content that can be embedded on their own sites. Sprout’s creations (known as “sprouts”) are also frequently incorporated into social media campaigns.
Where: Sproutinc.com (corporate bio); San Francisco, although Matthew says the team is “truly distributed,” as he lives in New Hampshire (analog); Facebook Fan Page (Yes, you can write on their wall); @Sprout (Twitter).
Who else: Slide; SlideRocket. But, “not too many that focus on branding the way we do.”
Worst Job: I grew up in Indiana, and, in the summers, I would de-tassel corn.
Has a Geek Crush on: I’m gonna get letters from all my Apple (AAPL) friends for saying this: Bill Gates of Microsoft (MSFT).
Gadget of the Moment: I finally got an iPhone, but I got it for $50, refurb.
Tech Wish: I wish I could build a sprout for my iPhone, but that means it would need to run Flash.
Fails at: I’m not a very good communicator, and every once in a while I catch myself closing up and not communicating with the [Sprout] team the way I need to.
Shares a hometown w/James Dean. Picked corn until he got his first computer. Was a software engineer/consultant before moving to Sprout.
What does Sprout bring to the table that others don’t?
At the most basic level, it’s about the speed. Before Sprout, you really needed to understand Flash and the sort of movie metaphor that it puts out in order to use it. Now, it’s much faster. If you know PowerPoint, you can use our product.
We also have a big push in the social networking space. That’s unique to us. If you are looking to put out a really rich media campaign on a social network, there’s no better service. You can also change things on the fly. Someone in the ad department can say, “Hey, this ad isn’t working.” And you can change it in five minutes, and it’s back up.
Who isn’t using Sprout, but should?
I can think of two examples. One would be, say, a yoga instructor who was also tech savvy. She could build up a quick shell of a Web presence with Sprout and sell it to other yogis who just want to give classes, but still have a nice, clean, updated Web site.
The second thing would be a porn sprout. That’s one industry that could really benefit from our technology, but just hasn’t yet. I mean, imagine, video clips and little libraries. We’ve seen some slightly suggestive things come across the bow, but no one has really gone all the way yet. I really hope you print that.
Is there a formula for an attention-grabbing Sprout widget?
It’s different in every industry. Overall, a little animation and really good-looking graphics help. But, when it comes to engagement, we do have some idea.
It has to be contextually relevant [in the social media space], your friends should be fans of this Facebook page [for it to become popular], stuff like that. I mean, with good design, you can get someone like this guy from Des Moines who has basically cornered the market on real estate widgets.
Who should buy Sprout?
You mean besides Google? Seriously, though, we do work with Google (GOOG) quite a bit, and I’d love to see us become the small to medium-sized business ad building tool for them.
Most real geeks have memories where they saw something new and said to themselves, “Dang, I love living in the future.” What’s yours?
My brother and I got this old North Star computer at this garage sale or something, and I programmed through the night to get this thing to predict, you know, randomize lottery numbers. I never won anything, of course, but I was just so enamored by it.
That kinda got me hooked into the notion that you can work on something and lose yourself in it.
Guestblogger Paul Spinrad is a freelance writer/editor, and is Projects Editor for MAKE magazine. He is the author of The VJ Book and The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids, and was an early contributor to bOING bOING when it was an online zine. He lives in San Francisco.
I love Tom Geisler's art illustrations, which combine the life-improving spirit of chindogu with the obsessive precision of antique technical drawings (he's also a technical illustrator). Tom is working on a book, "Reduce. Reuse. Reinvent: Free Patents That Will Save Our Galaxy," and here's some material from it, including an hilarious series of pages that illustrate the inventor's personal history.
Despite its wealth and nominal status, Italy's counterparts in Europe look at it with derision and dismay for the circuses of which the Knox case is but one more. Public life in Italy often evinces these pious but oddly inscrutable outcomes, produced with alarming regularity by legal and political institutions that are like cargo-cult copies of those possessed by other nations.
This example, however, may be easier to understand than most. The jurors wore Italian flags while the judge read their verdict.
Source: Boing Boing | 4 Dec 2009 | 6:43 pm
FROM GAMERTELL - Dell has started it 8 Days of Deals program for December 2009. For the first day of the deal (December 4, 2009) you’ll find a Wii console for $185 as well as three other items…
MORE »
For an OS that isn’t even out yet, Chrome OS sure has a bunch of people going crazy over it. I’ll admit, I’m definitely looking forward to seeing it when it’s released, but I’m going to wait until then.
Right now it’s not a perfect build; we should expect that at this point, given that Chrome isn’t supposed to be out for a year. Not everything works, and what does work isn’t as fast as Google and its users want. You can take a look for yourself in this video demo of Chrome OS running as the primary OS on a laptop. I get it, it looks promising. But do we really need to put this thing through its paces a year before it’s supposed to be out? I say let the Google folks work on their project and get back to us. They don’t need people looking over their proverbial shoulder every step of the way.
This week’s big story – unless you count news that matters outside the world of TechCrunch – is the End the CrunchPad. Killed, says Arrington, by ‘greed, jealousy and miscommunication’. Basically the same things that killed Jesus, New Coke and Haley Joel Osment at the end of Pay It Forward.
Dick Move Of The Week
This week marks the start of a new regular feature. Entitled ‘Dick Move Of The Week’ it will celebrate people or companies who go out of their way to shatter dreams, waste time and effort or generally move in the manner of a dick. This week’s recipient is Craigslist, for reasons perfectly articulated in this story by Jason Kincaid…
“Developers take note: if you’ve got a mashup built off of Craigslist’s data, don’t even think about showing it to anyone who works there. At least, that’s the lesson learned by developer Romy Maxwell, who says that Craigslist has blocked both his mashup and every single project built on Yahoo Pipes a few days after a friendly Email exchange he had with Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.”
To be fair to Craig, this seems to be less of a problem with Craig (who denies any personal knowledge of the decision) and more a decision by ‘Slist – but the fact remains that anyone who uses Yahoo Pipes to hack their Craigslist experience has now completely wasted their time. Dick Move Of The Week.
Acquisitions Of The Week
In happier news, it seems that the Internet giants are indulging in some earlyish holiday shopping with Google buying AppJet, Amazon à acheter Vente-Privee and Apple reportedly in talks to acquire music service LaLa. The latter provided a particularly colourful TechCrunch post with Jason heading down to LaLa’s office to get the scoop.
“I walked over to the Lala office, which is only a few blocks from us, to see if I could gather any more details. They didn’t seem particularly happy to see me. I knocked on the door and a Lala employee answered, keeping the door half shut so that I couldn’t see in. I asked if any of the company’s executives were around. He looked over his shoulder, asked if they were, and a second later said they weren’t (it was not a particularly convincing effort). He promptly shut the door, and I’m pretty sure I heard someone inside say something to the effect of ‘Are you serious, don’t answer it!’.”
Cowards! You can’t hide from the news.
Jugaad Of The Week
Editor at Large Sarah Lacy continues to live up to her entirely made up job title this week with the last of her dispatches from India. First up she taught us a new word, asking Can India “Jugaad” Its Way To More Angel Investing? “Jugaad”, Sarah explains, describes “an innate creativity for problem solving, and it’s what’s allowing a small group of Indian entrepreneurs to shortcut years of market evolution to bring angel investment to Indian technology startups.
It’s also a quality much in evidence at SMSONE – a micro-local news service that uses basic SMS to bring vitally important news to un-wired rural communities. For those commenters who whine every time TechCrunch writes another story about Valley-focused smart phone driven playthings like FourSquare, these two posts are for you.
Plastic Fantastic Of The Week
Speaking of Valley-focused smart phone driven playthings, December kicked off with the unveiling of ‘Square’ – a new mobile credit card payment service by Jim McKelvey and Twitter creator Jack Dorsey. Finally the age-old problem of hookers accepting credit cards has been solved – no wonder the company has a $40million valuation before it has even launched. Hell, if McKelvey and Dorsey move fast, there’s still time for them to win an Obama-style pre-emptive Crunchie.
Goodbye Of The Week
And finally, in Good-News-Bad-News-news, Chicago-based group-buying site ‘Groupon’, which sounds like the name of a medical clamp, has raised $30million from Accel. This is of course great news for the company, but it’s also bad news for TechCrunch HQ as it means the brilliant Leena Rao is moving to Chicago where her husband Suneel has just accepted a job as Groupon’s VP of Product Development. Congratulations Suneel – but we’ll miss you, Leena.
Happy Digg.com day everyone!
Seriously.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 TopNews United States | FCC questions Verizon's early termination fees Register US regulators are demanding that Verizon Wireless explain why it's doubling early termination fees for smartphone customers and why subscribers without a data plan are charged for inadvertently accessing its mobile web service. ... US regulator asks Verizon to explain fees FCC asks Verizon Wireless to explain fees FCC Examines Verizon's Doubling of Early Termination Fees |
By Matthew Rivera, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
If you look up and see red weather balloons this weekend, take note. You’ve unwittingly entered into a social experiment.
The Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, launched 10 balloons, each eight feet wide, around the country as part of its “Network Challenge.” The first person or team to locate all of them will win $40,000. Darpa says that the contest is meant to look at how “information spreads and propagates and becomes viral.”
But it’s more than a simple test of crowdsourcing, which has been used to build public databases like Wikipedia or in Wired’s recent hunt for Evan Ratliff.
Peter Lee, director of Darpa’s transformational convergence technology office, which focuses on tech and social trends, said that by giving participants an incentive, like the prize money, the contest tests how people organize themselves and how they validate information.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
We’ve had a chance to play SGN’s Skies Of Glory WWII person-to-person dogfighting game for the iPhone. But now they’ve released this trailer for the game to really show off what they’ve built. Look for a launch date shortly.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Apple could be knocking on the door of Lala, an online music service, with plans to buy out the Palo Alto-based startup.
Two anonymous sources told Bloomberg they could not be identified because talks are still in progress. The terms of the deal are unknown. However, if the rumor is true, it suggests Apple is thinking about its next competitive move in digital music, with the emergence of cloud-based audio services such as Pandora and Last.fm.
Lala allows customers to listen to songs on their site once for free. Then, customers have two options: to pay 10 cents to listen to songs from Lala’s online servers, or to pay 79 cents to download a song onto their computer hard drive.
On a similar subject, Cult of Mac in August reported that Apple was building a 500,000-square-foot data center in North Carolina. Rich Miller, editor of Data Center Knowledge, speculates that given its enormity, Apple’s data center would most likely focus on cloud computing — hosting services or data over the web. If the acquisition pans out, perhaps Lala’s service would be integrated into this new data center to support Apple’s gigantic iTunes customer base.
Wired.com’s Eliot Van Buskirk speculates a Lala acquisition could lead to deep discounts for iTunes customers. See his report at Wired.com’s Epicenter.
See Also:
Photo: Manny Hernandez/Flickr
“It’s a new model. You basically put all your information on servers and you have fast networks and lots of different kinds of personal computers and mobile phones that can use the applications…it’s a powerful model and it’s where the industry is going. It is the centerpiece of our 2010 strategy.”
– Google CEO Eric Schmidt says cloud computing is the centerpiece of the company’s 2010 strategy.
 TopNews United Kingdom (blog) | Microsoft, Yahoo take next step in search alliance The Associated Press SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. have signed off on their plan to team up against Google Inc. in the lucrative Internet search market. The step announced Friday seals the terms of a preliminary agreement announced in late July. ... Yahoo sees exponential growth in mobile ads Yahoo Focused on Growing Mobile Advertising Yahoo, Microsoft: Finalize Search, Advertising Agreement |
Our last Friday Giveaway was a Sonos S5 Wireless Music System. This week Kodak was kind enough to hand us a Zi8 pocket video camera, and one of you is going to have it in your hands shortly.
CrunchGear’s overview of the Zi8 is here. This is a Flip-like picked video camera that records in 1080p high definition. The device includes a SD/SDHC card slot for expandable storage. And the best feature is this – the Zi8 has an external microphone jack to help get decent audio into the device. Poor audio has plagued the Flip cameras.
Here’s how you can get the device. Just do one of two things: either retweet this post, and make sure to include the #crunch hashtag, or leave a comment below telling us why this device must be yours. The contest ends at noon California time on Saturday. Please only tweet the message once, anyone tweeting repeatedly will be disqualified. We’ll pick a winner tomorrow afternoon and contact you for more details. Anyone in the world is eligible. Kodak is generously donating the device and we’re covering the shipping costs. If you aren’t lucky enough to get the free one, you can buy the Zi8 for $177 here.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Remember CableCARDs? You probably don’t because most of us have never seen one. They were supposed to be a way to inject the magic of premium cable into OEM devices like PCs and DVRs. Instead they were hard to acquire, hard to use, and generally a bad idea. I would estimate that CableCARDs single-handedly led to current slow demise of TiVo.
The FCC agrees and is calling them a total failure. Here’s what they said in a recent report:
“The Commission’s CableCARD rules have resulted in limited success in developing a retail market for navigation devices. Certification for plug-and-play devices is costly and complex.”
So that said, where do we go from here? Tru2way. The new system will offload “navigation” (basically channel changing) to the device in question and only dedicate the cable signal acquisition to the card itself. What really needs to happen? Smartcard integration with Cable boxes, the same kind you see in satellite systems and Euro cable systems. This lets you take you card, put it into a box, and watch TV.
The problem is this: the cable companies like a nice monopoly. They don’t want their content reaching the Internet (*ahem*). Their short-sighted antics hurt innovation. There’s no way around it.
Just a quick reminder that today is the last day to submit your nominations for our third annual Crunchies Awards. We’ve received over 100,000 nominations so far, but just in case you’ve forgotten, go here right now and add some more. You have until midnight PT tonight.
Once all the nominations are in, the Crunchies Committee will choose five finalists per award category. From there, the popular voting will begin on December 21 and run through January 6, leading up to the live ceremony Friday, January 8, 2010 at 7:30 pm PT the Herbst Theater in San Francisco which we’re pleased to be co-hosting with GigaOm and VentureBeat. The full rules are here.
Again, nominations end tonight at midnight, so get them in.
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Just so you know, the iPhone is still a fireball waiting to happen. The latest in a series of combustive incidents had an iPhone being used as a source for music at a party.
It then exploded, filling the room with smoke and firing the battery onto the floor. No one was hurt, luckily, but the vibe was totally harshed.
Once again, I say: this is not the behavior of a well device. Sure, it’s only happening to one phone in a million, but when was the last time you heard about any other phone bursting into flames?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Earlier this week, Microsoft showed off the Twitter functionality it’s building into the newest version of Bing Maps. The feature shows tweets on a map. But that requires the new Bing Maps beta, which requires Silverlight. If you prefer to use Google Maps, you can also easily see geolocated tweets on your maps thanks to tweet stream RSS feeds that include geolocation data in them.
Simply load up Google Maps, grab the Twitter feed of anyone who checks-in and tags their location, and insert that URL into the search box on Maps. On the map, you’ll see a collection of blue markers indicating where the tweets were sent from (here’s an example). Clicking on any of these markers brings up the tweet itself in a bubble overlay. And in the left side column, you’ll see the a timeline of the geolocated tweets.
You can add these feeds from several users and Google Maps will remember them, so you can see a collection of your friends’ tweet locations. And it even works for Lists feeds.
Also cool is that this same process works on the iPhone. You’ll have to copy a feed URL to get it to work, and again, copy it into the search box, but it displays on the map nicely.
The Bing Maps Twitter location integration (below), looks much nicer as it’s natively built in with things like user icons, and the ability to display tweeted pictures. But again, it also requires Silverlight, and you can’t easily filter by things like Lists.
[thanks Peter]
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Section: Gadgets / Other, ebooks
Barnes & Noble looks to be having a bit of difficulty with releasing its first gadget. There certainly has been no dearth of pre-orders, people seem to really want to get their hands on the Nook. The trouble seems to be Barnes & Noble itself, not communicating well with customers, and constantly changing its plans.
Now, hopefully for the last time, we have the official word on the status of the Nook in B&N stores. According to Barnes & Noble, rather than having Nooks available at high-traffic stores with limited quantities to sell, every store will now have demo units starting Monday December 7. No store will have any Nooks to sell, however. Pre-ordering is still the best and only way to get yourself or somebody else a Nook. If ordering today, the shipment date has been pushed to January 15, 2010. Still way outside the holidays, but it is only about a five to six week wait.
The reason for the lack of units to be sold in stores seems to be to ship Nooks to those who pre-ordered early, and probably so everyone outside of those “high-traffic” stores will get a chance to see the device. Those early pre-orders should be receiving their Nooks by the middle of next week as stated in the emails that some, possibly most received this week. As noted earlier in the week, my email has still not come, and the Barnes & Noble Unbound blog has had several comments from others who have received no email, and still have an “expected ship date” of November 30. Presumably Barnes & Noble will be shipping our Nooks along with everyone else, and we can put all this drama behind us all when the first shipments are sent out and received.
Read [Barnes & Noble Unbound]
Full Story » | Written by Shawn Ingram for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Did you know you can recharge your mobile devices without an actual power outlet? It’s true! You can use solar power, magic, or little alternators like this YoGen charger.
It’s a simple device that comes with mini-USB and iPod tips — other tips are available, too. There’s a little pull out ripcord that you yank back and forth which, in turn, generates a trickle of electricity for whatever’s plugged into the other end.
The product packaging promises a “rate of charge similar to standard chargers.” I can’t really verify that but I can tell you that after about three minutes of tugging, my T-Mobile G1 phone went from 29% battery to 30% battery – so plan accordingly. You’re not going to replenish half your battery in a timely manner. We’re talking emergency minutes here.
And though the review unit sent to me came with an iPod tip along with the mini-USB tip, I got the following message when I took my iPhone for a whirl with the YoGen:
Fun. Owning an iPhone is like living with your parents after you’ve turned 18. You come home late and/or drunk, they yell at you, you counter with “I’m an adult now!,” to which they reply, “As long as you live in our house and eat our food you play by our rules.”
You like free food, the house is spotless, and you have no money for rent anywhere else, so you shut up. Similarly, you want the cool iPhone, and you quickly find out that you can’t plug anything into it that isn’t a white cable. Tough but fair (and admittedly overly simplistic).
Whatever the case, I’m guessing/hoping this issue will be worked out by the time the production-quality units ship on December 9th. YoGen’s store page lists iPods and iPhones as compatible, but if you’re thinking of buying one for your iPhone you may want to wait and see what other owners have to say once the units start shipping. As for mini-USB devices (like the other phone I tested) there shouldn’t be too many issues (if any).
The $40 YoGen Charger is available for pre-order in clear or black colors and with Apple + mini-USB connectors or LG + Nokia + Sony Ericsson + micro-USB connectors.
Order YoGen [YogenStore.com]
Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) finally dotted all their i’s and crossed all their t’s today on the final definitive agreement for their search and online advertising partnership.
Somewhere a lawyer got his briefs.
No one but tech reporters and hair-trigger Wall Street analysts care, but the pair had to extend the deadline for inking the formal deal because it was so darn complex!
The companies have been near closure for weeks, but niggling details kept popping up, sources said, the better to sue each other if things went bad.
Now that this small hurdle has been cleared, MicroHoo has to wait for a variety of regulatory approvals before attempting their daring and quite possibly foolhardy ascent to the top of Mount Search, from whose peak Google (GOOG) has been enjoying the view all by its lonesome for a good long time now.
That is expected to happen early in 2010, and how the software giant and the Silicon Valley Internet icon traverse the dangerous crevasse of coordinating their advertising and tech systems will be gripping to watch (from the cozy safety of BoomTown’s HQ, of course).
And I can’t wait until MicroHoo has to master the blue links of death ice field.
You know: Because it’s there.
Here is their joint statement:
Yahoo! and Microsoft Finalize Search Agreement
SUNNYVALE, CA and REDMOND, WA–04 December, 2009–Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corporation today announced that the companies have finalized and executed the definitive Search and Advertising Services and Sales Agreement and License Agreement in accordance with the letter agreement announced in July.
The companies released the following joint statement:
“Microsoft and Yahoo! believe that this deal will create a sustainable and more compelling alternative in search that can provide consumers, advertisers and publishers real choice, better value, and more innovation.
“Yahoo! and Microsoft welcome the broad support the deal has received from key players in the advertising industry and remain hopeful that the closing of the transaction can occur in early 2010.”
Given the flurry of reports last summer about the Yahoo/Microsoft search deal, it would have been reasonable to assume that the two parties had actually completed their negotiations. As it turns out, the details of the deal had yet to be worked out. Today, Yahoo and Microsoft have issued a joint statement announcing that they’ve “finalized and executed the definitive Search and Advertising Services and Sales Agreement and License Agreement.” From the release:
“Microsoft and Yahoo! believe that this deal will create a sustainable and more compelling alternative in search that can provide consumers, advertisers and publishers real choice, better value, and more innovation.
“Yahoo! and Microsoft welcome the broad support the deal has received from key players in the advertising industry and remain hopeful that the closing of the transaction can occur in early 2010.”
Of course, the deal is still under investigation by the Department of Justice, so nothing is in the bag yet.
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We’ve heard of people getting upset when their picture shows up on Google Street View (the street-level picture you can zoom into from Google Maps). For this reason, Google blurs out people’s faces for privacy. Others have protested Google coming down their street to photograph their house (cough, Paul McCartney). But can Google Street View also be used as a marketing vehicle?
Nate Heagy thinks so. He went to great lengths to follow a Google Street View vehicle and anticipate its movements so that he could set up a sign in its path and start playing a guitar so that he could promote his band, Fearless Salesman. Well, he is now on Google Street View. Heagy explains how he executed his bold plan:
Last spring, . . . I hatched a plan to promote my indie band. After making a sign and keeping it in the trunk of my car for about a month I finally chanced across the google street view car. Then I had to follow it until I figured out its pattern, then get ahead of it with time to set up.
There is only one problem. His picture was taken in the middle of nowhere. Not only is it in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (which is in Canada, for all you geography majors out there). It is on a random residential street in Saskatoon that maybe five people will ever look up. Until now, I guess. Damn you, Heagy!
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Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 CNET News | Bing's 30-Minute Outage: A Sally Field Moment? PC World "The first time I didn't feel it, but this time I feel it, and I can't deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!" --Actress Sally Field during her Oscar acceptance speech for Best Actress in 1984's Places in the Heart In case you missed ... Microsoft's Bing Outage And The NFL Parallels See Geolocated Tweets On Google Maps And The iphone Too Inside Word: Bing Is 'Dumbing Down' Search |
AP - In simpler times, maintaining good health was a matter of joining a gym or lacing up running shoes for a loop in the park. At most, you'd buy a watch with a digital display so you could time your laps.
Apple has purchased online music service Lala, I’ve confirmed with a source familiar with the transaction. Both Bloomberg and CNET reported the chats earlier today. If you’d like other confirmation, New York Times also reports that the deal has closed.
Lala’s investors will not get a return on the $35 million they’ve put into the company. Earlier this year, founder Bill Nguyen told me he was working on a deal to get the company more funding in an “up round”–that is, at a higher value than the previous round.
But Warner Music Group (WMG), which had previously invested $20 million in Lala, wrote down $11 million of that. And a source tells me that the Apple transaction reflected a similar discount, meaning that investors will be lucky to get 50 cents on the dollar on this one.
UPDATE: A second source close to the company insists my estimate is “way off” but won’t offer up other details.
What’s unclear is exactly what Apple has bought. Lala offers listeners a streaming music service with one free play and access to replays–not downloads–for 10 cents a track. But while the service recently got a boost via Google’s (GOOG) new music search offering, where it’s one of two featured partners, it doesn’t have a huge customer base to sell, which means Apple (AAPL) could be interested in acquiring its technology and/or team.
The deal is the third acquisition of an online music service in recent months. News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace has already picked up iLike and Imeem at fire-sale prices.
I’ve put in requests for comment to both Apple and Lala.
Section:
Haven’t caught all of the Gadgetell news this week? Here’s your chance to catch up on this week’s top 10 articles!
Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Geeky gadgets | Hands On with Google's Public DNS PC Magazine DNS is the switchboard of the internet: Type in a text URL like www.pcmag.com, and it finds the numeric IP address to get you there. Google, which seems to be releasing something in just about every consumer-facing software space, ... Google Public DNS, Cisco Gets Tandberg DNS security and performance considerations, and ISP alternatives Google Public DNS Security Not Breaking New Ground, Some Say |
Short Version: Gunnar’s “MLG Legend” glasses are a good choice for gamers and workers alike who suffer from eye problems created from staring at a screen for long periods of time. While the thought of wearing specialty glasses with amber lenses in front of a computer or TV screen may seem pretentious to some, the benefits of these glasses outweigh the possibility of any social backlash. The price point of $99.00 is reasonable, and the durability of these glasses is remarkable given their lightweight design.
Features
Pros
Cons
Review
A few months ago I started having vision problems. My eyes would get tired, my long distance vision would get blurry for what I thought was no apparent reason, and whenever these symptoms occurred I would have short but very painful headaches. At first I thought that my vision was just starting to deteriorate and that all I needed was to finally get some prescription glasses. It seemed odd though, that my problems would come and go, rather than being constant. Then I came across an ad on a gaming website for these special glasses which were constructed for those with problems like mine. Turns out staring at a computer screen for 8 hours a day and then going home and playing video games for another few is really bad for your eyes. Who would have thought?
I reached out to Gunnar, the maker of these glasses and they sent me their special MLG edition eye-ware since I am a self-professed gamer. This pair, other than its appearance, is no different from Gunnar’s other line of products. The chrome frame, light amber lens, and aviator style give them a pretty sleek look. The glasses are also very light which makes wearing them comfortable. They have the Major League Gaming logo right by the lens, as they are a preferred partner of the competitive gaming league. These glasses do however seem to sit higher up on the face than normal (sun)glasses. This is slightly annoying as I think they look a bit awkward because of this, but who knows, maybe I just have a oddly shaped face. This minor problem notwithstanding, after about a week of wearing these, my problems went away. No more headaches, and no more blurry vision. I was hooked.
These glasses are great for those who stare at a computer screen for hours a day, but even better for those who game heavily. Through independent research, it was found that many gamers go up to three entire minutes without blinking, and the blink rate of an individual can go down to nearly twenty percent of normal blinking whilst playing video games. Try going three minutes right now without blinking, and then do that consistently for hours on end, daily. It’s obviously not something you want to have happen as it compromises eye integrity.
I was worried about wearing these with my headset as I didn’t want the headset to push the frames into the side of my head, which would obviously cause at the very least, slight pain. However, the slim chrome frames are perfect for those like me who game with a headset. My Astro A40’s fit perfectly over my Gunnars with no discomfort whatsoever.
The proprietary technology used in these glasses works by bending light from screens before it hits your eyes, letting your eye muscles relax: thus reducing strain. Given the amber lens tinting, colors are distorted to a small degree. You won’t see true colors, but this is because the Gunnars screen out the harmful portions of the light spectrum (Gunnar VP of Marketing Mark McNabb told me that they have clear lenses as well for those who do graphic design). There is also what i like to call a “magnifying effect” when wearing these glasses. I play my video games on a 22″ 1080p LCD tv, and when playing, the screen seemed a few inches larger. Again, this is due to the filtering properties of the glasses. To be honest, given the screens that I stare at all day, this is a welcome side effect. The images you look at are also much sharper than without them. This, other than not having blurry vision and headaches is their biggest attribute. Playing Assassin’s Creed 2 while wearing these glasses was quite a treat.
As with all glasses, smudging and fingerprints are always bothersome. The oleophobic coating on the lenses help to mitigate these nuisances. I’d say that within a week of intensive wear, I only have to wipe off the lenses about 2-3 times.
The durability of these glasses is what surprised me the most. When I’m not wearing the Gunnars, they are usually perched upon my hat. More than once they have dropped the six feet from my hat to the ground and have withstood the barrage. I did a drop test here at the TechCrunch Headquarters from above my head onto the ground, adding another two feet, and they once again withstood the fall. The glasses come with a padded plastic case in order to ensure that they do not get dirty or broken when not being worn.
These glasses are designed for those with 20/20 or corrective vision (including those with contacts). However, if you do not have perfect vision, Gunnars can be made to work for you. Simply talk to your optometrist and have your Gunnars specified to your vision specifications.
Many pro gamers use these glasses and swear by them. I wore them, and while they won’t make me go pro by simply wearing them, they sure did make the experience more enjoyable. The glasses cost $99 and given the improvements they’ve made for me, I would recommend giving them a try.
Product Page: Gunnar Optiks MLG Legend Glasses
A lot has been made recently about the gaming elements of location-based social networks. Services like Foursquare and Gowalla allow users to compete for things like mayorships, badges, and virtual goods. Now Loopt is getting in on the fun, and taking it more literally into the real world.
The Loopt Holiday Scavenger Crawl is exactly what it sounds like: It’s a scavenger hunt during the holidays. But it’s also a bit more. As everyone knows, the holidays for many are also about a fair amount of drinking, so Loopt is mixing a pub crawl into the mix as well. The plan is to have this take place in three different cities: Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco at various dates in December and early January.
Obviously, this crawl will be based around Loopt’s mobile application. The company recently shifted gears a bit to move away from a constant location updater to more of a check-in model that the aforementioned Foursquare and Gowalla use. The idea will be to follow others players using the app and go from location to location solving clues and interacting with others. There will be prizes to be won, and also access to some sort of VIP party, we’re told. The big prize is a round-trip ticket to Hawaii.
The game will apparently work for users with and iPhone, iPod touch, or Blackberry.
Alongside this event, Loopt has launched a new LooptGames website. For now this site is only for the scavenger crawl, but in the future, Loopt will continue to use this for other games of this nature. “We obviously have become interested in how some cool game dynamics can help people connect with their cities,” founder Sam Altman tells us.
This first game takes place on December 12 in Los Angeles, December 19 in New York, and January 2 in San Francisco. The first 500 people to sign up on the site get a free Loopt t-shirt.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Google, which has bought five companies in five months, just made it an even half-dozen: The company has snapped up AppJet, an online collaboration start-up run by veterans of the search giant. That’s CEO Aaron Iba on the right, in a photo presumably taken after the deal closed.
Google hasn’t even acknowledged the purchase yet–AppJet announced it on its blog–but when it does, I don’t expect to see a purchase price. AppJet, which hatched out of the Y Combinator incubator a couple years ago, has raised a reported $700,000 in angel funding, which means that whatever price Google (GOOG) paid won’t be material enough to require a disclosure.
AppJet says it will be working on Google’s Wave platform/product/whatever it is, which so far seems to be popular in concept but baffling in execution. Just below is an AppJet-produced video explaining its EtherPad word processing program, which allows for real-time collaboration.
[Aaron Iba photo via AppJet investor Seth Goldstein]
 SAMAA TV | Google acquires EtherPad online collaboration tool CNET News Google, probably the most prominent advocate of moving traditional productivity software such as word processors online, acquired a small company called AppJet whose EtherPad service fits into that agenda. ... Google Buys Online Word Processing Startup AppJet Google buys collaboration app to boost Wave Confirmed: Google Acquires appjet, The Maker Of etherpad |
Section: Computers, Peripherals, Mice / Keyboards, Web, Google
Most of the people I know use Gmail, but at the same time I am not sure any of them, or anyone for that matter needs a keyboard that was designed for Gmail. That said, the Gboard does have a strange nerd appeal for me.
As for what the Gboard actually is, well it is a 19 key keyboard that will let you navigate through your Gmail account like a pro. Included on the keyboard are the most commonly used shortcuts to include search, stars, reply all, forward, archive, trash, next and so on.
Of course, I should point out that this is not an official Google product, but one that comes courtesy of Charlie Mason, who is a film producer that has chosen to make the Gboard his first computer hardware product.
As far as using the Gboard, it seems that it cannot get any simpler. Plus the keyboard into an available USB port, enable (if you have not already) keyboard shortcuts in Gmail and start enjoying your newfound simplicity.
The Gboard will set you back $19.99 and can be purchased directly from the Gboard website.
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Poor North Korea (politics aside, of course). It finds itself in the “group of death” in the 2010 FIFA World Cup, alongside Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire, and Portugal. With all due respect to the team, there’s no way it’s going to get past the likes of Luís Fabiano and Kaká, Didier Drogba and Yaya Touré, and Cristiano Ronaldo and, well… let’s just count Cristiano twice. Twitter agrees: “Groups of death aren’t always deadly groups. But North Korea are completely dead already. #worldcupdraw.” Yes, this will be the first FIFA World Cup of the Twitter era. Brace yourselves.
I watched the draw live while simultaneously monitoring Twitter. You’re right: I have nothing better to do with my time. Here’s a few choice tweets:
• By the way, England, Algeria, Slovenia and USA is its own group of death. A death of exciting football!
• France, of course, gets punished for the handball vs Ireland by being placed in the South Africa group. #worldcupdraw
• Los españoles creen que Chile es una selección fácil… pobresitos. (The Spanish think that Chile is an easy team… poor things.)
• HEXA CAMPEÃO EM 2010: BRASIL ! (Six-time champions in 2010: Brazil!)
• Mesmo! Brasil ou Portugal? Digamos que com tantos brasileiros a jogar na selecção portuguesa vai ser um jogo Brasil vs Brasil B (I agree! Brazil or Portugal? They say that so many Brazilians play for the Portuguese team that it’ll be a game of Brazil vs Brazil B.) (Note: I legit lol’d at that one.)
• Team USA drew those Limey bastards from England In the FIFA World cup draw today!
• Fuck yeah America! We gonna kick us some Algeria and Slovenia ass! Soccer! USA! USA! USA! USA!
Yes, the “USA! USA!” chant is somehow just as obnoxious on Twitter as it is in the stands of an actual match.
I fully expect Twitter to shine during the tournament.
![Screen shot 2009-12-04 at [ December 4 ] 12.42.13 PM](http://www.mobilecrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Screen-shot-2009-12-04-at-December-4-12.42.13-PM-630x114.png "Screen shot 2009-12-04 at [ December 4 ] 12.42.13 PM")
Just about each and every time we review an Android phone, one of the first questions that shows up in the comments is, “So – how is it at syncing?” The answer to that is a bit complex. If you’re just looking to sync with Google services (like Gmail, Google Calendar, etc.), it’s great. Anything outside of that and, well, it kinda sucks. For anyone accustomed to using an iTunes-like interface for adding music, dragging and dropping things into folders may seem a bit archaic.
We’ve seen a good amount of clamoring for an Android-edition of Markspace’s The Missing Sync application, which has made its name by filling in the syncing-gaps on every platform from Windows Mobile to the Sony PSP. Clamorers, be still; Markspace has now answered the call. So what does it do?
Markspace has most of this stuff working on just about every Android device out there. They’re having some issues getting contact sync working on Android 2.0, so the Droid is limited to just the media-related stuff until they figure it out.
In the coming weeks, Markspace will be adding Calendar, To-Do list, Notes, and Bookmark syncing, along with fancy features like SMS backup and wireless, proximity-based syncing.
At $40 bucks, it certainly doesn’t come cheap. If you’re willing to splurge for the syncing functionality, however, you can find it right here.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
By Geoffrey A. Fowler, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Hearst is unveiling Skiff, its own service to sell subscriptions to newspapers and magazines on dedicated e-reading and other convergent devices.
Hearst executives say that they were driven to create Skiff because existing options just don’t live up to the expectations of newspaper readers–and the business needs of publishers.
Here’s a round-up of what else exists in the market today:
Amazon Kindle
The Offer: Wireless subscriptions to 77 U.S. and international newspapers and 40 magazines. Articles are displayed with headlines, text and some photos in a format that looks like the page in a book, not a newspaper.
Prices: $6 to $15 per month for newspapers, $1.50 to $11
Sony Reader
The Offer: Subscriptions to newspapers and magazines, which have yet to be named. More are forthcoming when Sony’s (SNE) wireless Daily Edition Reader hits the market later this month.
Prices: Unknown
Read the rest of this post on the original site
 Windows 7 News (blog) | Microsoft Promises Six Updates for Final Patch Tuesday of 2009 PC World Microsoft has published the Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification for December 2009. According to the notice, Microsoft will release a total of six new security bulletins next Tuesday for the final Patch Tuesday of ... Report: Microsoft to randomize Europe's browser screen choices Microsoft agrees to randomise browser choices Microsoft Decision Brings It Closer to Settling Case |
The word “droid” is short for “android.” When you think of androids you think of robots. “Robot” is a Czech word that means “drudgery.” “Drudgery” is defined as “dull, irksome, and fatiguing work.” And let me tell you: it is dull, irksome, and fatiguing to sit through this latest Verizon Droid commercial.
The word “droid” is short for “android.” When you think of androids you think of robots. “Robot” is a Czech word that means “drudgery.” “Drudgery” is defined as “dull, irksome, and fatiguing work.” And let me tell you: it is dull, irksome, and fatiguing to sit through this latest Verizon Droid commercial.
The ad, which just started airing on TV, takes aim at the iPhone, calling it, among other things, “digitally clueless.” The implication is that the Droid, well, isn’t. It’s fast, and ludicrously so (“a racehorse duct-taped to a scud missile); it knows its way around the Web (“like a circular saw through a ripe banana”); and it’s built not to look pretty, but to do.
To do what? I don’t know, it just “does.” Or as they say in the Spanish commercials I see on Fox Sports en Español and GolTV, “Droid hace.”
Attack ads are weird. You know how in politics, politicians will always claim to run a clean campaign with no negative ads, but then that promise is broken as soon as their poll numbers turn south? And then how people always tell pollsters that negative/attack ads don’t affect them, yet when exit pollsters ask them the same question they’re all, “Well, my guy said the other guy hates puppies, so…” That’s what’s going on here: Verizon is trying to knock the Apple off its little perch. Maybe it’ll work?
(Apple isn’t “above” running attack ads, either. You’ll recall the long-running “Mac vs. PC” ads, yes?)
Who would have thought, years ago, that we’d be seeing “my phone is better than your phone” commercials on TV?
Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile
AT&T may be offering half-price BlackBerry Bold’s and Curve’s, but Verizon is also offering a deal of their own. Except in the case of Verizon, their offer is not half-off, but buy-one-get-one free.
According to the details, which are coming by way of the Boy Genius, this offer is valid only for a short time, December 4 through December 7.
As far as what you can get for free. It looks like those that pick up a Motorola DROID or an HTC Droid Eris will be able to get an HTC Eris for free. Granted it would be nice if you were able to get a Motorola DROID for free, but still, the Eris is a more than capable phone—especially for free.
Other handsets that are included in the BOGO sale are the enV Touch, and the enV 3. Finally, although the BOGO pricing for the Android handsets ends on December 7, it was noted that the enV deal will be valid though Christmas Day.
Via [BGR]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
FROM APPLETELL - There’s enough here to keep you happy, and you have to be thankful for the freebies, especially when you’re spending everything on presents at this time of year.
MORE »
Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
When’s the last time you ordered something off of QVC? For me, the last time was when I was 11 years old. Christmas was coming, I hadn’t bought my family any presents yet, and QVC just seemed so damned convenient. Combine that with the fact that I knew exactly where my parents kept their credit cards, and you can probably guess what happened next. Why yes, customer service agent, I am Mr. Kumparak.
With that said, I don’t know a damned soul under the age of 65 who is a regular QVC customer. If you are — and hey, more power to you — and you happen to rock an iPhone, time to celebrate! QVC has just launched an iPhone app which allows you to see all items currently being shown on-air, “Today’s Special Value”, and other at-home shopping treats. Just be sure not to buy any disgustingly overpriced Wii bundles.
You can grab the app here.
[Via IntoMobile]
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By Nitrozac and Snaggy
Kensington’s $15 “Video Chat Light for Netbooks” can provide some much-needed illumination to your video chats. It’s powered by a single USB Port and features a flexible gooseneck that’s sturdy yet pliable.
There are eight LED lights inside the lamp and you can set the level at OFF, ON/4 (half the LEDs illuminated), and ON/8 (all LEDs illuminated).
The light output isn’t terribly bright but it casts a nice glow nonetheless. You won’t use this thing for making professional-looking feature films but it’s great to use at night or in a poorly-lit room. It can also pull double duty as a keyboard light.
Here’s a before-and-after taken during the day with all the lights off – there’s a window that gets partial sunlight over my left shoulder, for your reference.
JK, all the way. That’s the Enzyte Guy. He smiles a lot.
Here are the actual photos. The first is with no light, followed by ON/4, then ON/8.
No light.
Half light (ON/4).
Full light (ON/8).
So there you have it. Available now for $15 from Kensington.
Section: Gadgets / Other, Household
We have recently seen a little trick floating around the Internet showing off how to switch a standard power outlet to a few USB ports, which honestly was a little bit of a hacked together job. But that does not mean we cannot still have a wall outlet with a built-in USB port or two. And on top of that, this latest version comes complete with the two USB ports as well as two standard power outlets.
The product is coming courtesy of TruePower and can be found at FastMac, but unfortunately it is not yet available for purchase. The good news is that it looks like the wait will not be all that long as it was noted as shipping in early 2010. Of course, they are available as of today for pre-order, that is as long as you are willing to part with $9.95. Sign me up for a few.
Product [FastMac] Via [Iyaz.me]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Opti really has managed to turn an obscure patent into quite a little business model, hasn’t it? After squeezing $10 million out of Nvidia (not to mention quarterly royalty payments of $750,000) for infringing its patents on “Predictive Snooping of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses,” Opti turned around and filed suit against Apple (AAPL) for the same thing. And now a U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas has found in its favor and ordered Cupertino to pay $21.7 million in damages and prejudgment interest.
With its litigation against Apple nearly resolved, Opti can now focus attention on Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which the company has also sued for infringing its Predictive Snooping IP. That case heads to trial in February 2010.
[Image credit: Bob MacNeil]
While Verizon might not be shoving the HTC Droid Eris down our throats the same way they are with its Motorola-made sibling, the Droid, the Eris is still one slick little piece of mobile kit. What it lacks in form factor (that is, a physical keyboard), it makes up with its drop-dead-gorgeous Sense UI. The only shortcoming, as I see it, is that it’s still stuck on Android v1.5 while the Droid is touting around 2.0.
That issue will be fixed before too long, says Verizon. We already know that HTC is cracking away at getting Sense to play friend with version of Android 2.1, and now Verizon has set a loose date for the Eris’ update: Q1 2010. While they didn’t specifically say it’d be 2.0, they did say that it would include the turn-by-turn Google Maps Navigation function – which, unfortunately, only absolutely proves that it’ll be at least v1.6. Fortunately, InformationWeek dug for a bit more info, and Verizon confirmed that the Q1 upgrade would likely bump the Eris up to v2.0 or v2.1.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
The consumer electronics business, once the playground of large companies, has seen scrappy entrepreneurs charge in. But while the bar to becoming a hardware entrepreneur is lower than ever, it’s still not a gimme.
Indeed, there have been some big blowups along the way. The CrunchPad project, a stab at creating a $200 touchscreen tablet, ended abruptly this week, before the product could make its debut. Led by the opinionated Web 2.0 publisher Michael Arrington, CrunchPad was mired in delays and partner wrangling. Ultimately, after a year and a half of development efforts, Arrington declared that the idea was stillborn, blaming the company that helped him design the device, Fusion Garage. Despite that, Fusion Garage plans to go ahead with the launch next week, setting the stage for a potentially nasty legal battle.
Other projects have faced smaller but still significant difficulties. Fitbit, a $100 fitness tracker, created by first-time hardware entrepreneurs Eric Friedman and James Park, is shipping now, but its launch was delayed by months.
That’s not to say that hardware entrepreneurs are all doomed. Indeed, thanks to cheap and readily available overseas manufacturing, the bar to entering the hardware business is lower than ever. And there have been some standout successes: First-time hardware entrepreneurs have created such products as the Flip, a popular and inexpensive video recorder; the LiveScribe Pulse pen, a digital note-taking pen; the Chumby, a squeezable internet-connected display; and even new styles of notebook PCs.
So what does it really take to create a gadget? A smart product design, a realistic expectation of time and costs, and the ability to put together the right team, say entrepreneurs. Wired.com interviewed several hardware entrepreneurs to find out what works and what doesn’t.
About three years ago, John Chuang, a former CEO of a staffing company Aquent, decided he wanted to create a new kind of PC. The device, called litl Webbook, would be a compact notebook that could be used for browsing the internet, displaying digital photos and watching TV shows. A nifty hardware trick using a pivoted hinge would allow the device to morph from the traditional notebook into a picture frame.
As Chuang drew up the plans for the machine, he became increasingly convinced he would have to think like an Apple rather than a Dell.
“Any hardware company who thinks they are just doing hardware is going to realize pretty soon that there is a software component that will become very important in their ability to differentiate,” says Chuang.
It’s the secret to the consumer electronics business in the post-iPhone world: Software and services matter as much as hardware.
“Hardware and software are inseparable,” agrees Steve Tomlin, CEO and founder of Chumby. “The wrong model is in a lot of people’s brains because of what happened with PCs,” where different companies provided hardware and software.
To deliver a high-quality consumer experience, a gadget designer has to plan the whole package: hardware, software and interface.
Having a software and services component also allows the company to be flexible, says Tomlin. Earlier this year, Chumby said it would start licensing its software to be embedded into other devices such as Blu-ray players and digital photo frames. The move, if successful, would let Chumby go beyond early adopters to a larger, more general audience.
Hardware products are created by contract manufacturers in Asia. These are a relatively small group of companies that are willing to do business with anyone who has an idea, original or not.
The notion that you can create a mass-market consumer electronics product that can remain exclusively yours is a fallacy, say entrepreneurs. Accepting the hardware risk also makes it easier to focus on what the true value of the product is.
“If you are selling just a hardware product, the potential to be knocked off is very high,” says Jim Margraff, CEO of LiveScribe. “There’s always the risk of being copied and marginalized and in any competitive world, a standalone device means high price pressure.”
Instead, he says, raise the stakes by building a platform that can support a larger ecosystem.
Take the iPhone, for instance. If it was just about the device’s slim profile, responsive touchscreen and 3.5-inch display, creating an iPhone clone would be easy — indeed, look at dozens of cheap, unusable Chinese iPhone knockoffs. But instead, Apple’s elegant user interface and third-party app support have helped keep the iPhone ahead of its peers.
“Hardware is fast to [create] and is the easiest to copy. You can get a lot of competition very quickly,” says Chuang. “But software takes a lot of time. You can’t just replicate a great UI.”
Another option is to go open source from the beginning, says Chumby’s Tomlin. Community involvement can help refine the product and offer ideas on features you want to focus on.
“Anything we create, we are happy to open source,” says Tomlin. “Anyone can reverse engineer it anyway.”
Being an entrepreneur isn’t a part-time job. For gadget inventors, it can be especially grueling as they rack up the miles visiting contract manufacturers in Asia. And that’s important. Though most Asian manufacturers are used to working with international clients, the process still requires constant and close supervision.
“You want to make sure you have enough money and time,” says Chuang. “And invest in full prototypes often. A lot of entrepreneurs don’t want to do that and they end up with buggy products that take longer to fix.”
There are also administrative tasks such as legal contracts that require close attention. “Doing the blocking and tackling on the legal side consumes a lot of time,” says Tomlin.
“There has to be trust among partners, but remember, great walls make for trusted neighbors,” he says. “Good contracts can do the same.”
“When you work with big companies, you are on their schedule,” says Tomlin. “You are driven by their agendas.”
That can mean weeks of delay that entrepreneurs have little control over.
LiveScribe’s Pulse Pen product is no debutante. The product was already a hit in Target stores and has been available online through Amazon since 2008. Yet getting a wider retail distribution this year took longer than expected, says Margraff. Cautious retailers, skittish about the economy, pushed back on new product rollouts.
“Everything is later than expected,” says Margraff. “We were hoping to be in stores in time for the back-to-school seasons but we will now be there for the holidays.”
And that’s despite the “enormous interest” in the product, says Margraff. Layoffs in stores, changes in management, and fear about stocking and inventory levels pushed back product introductions.
LiveScribe now has inked deals with Best Buy, Staples and Apple to display its product in stores.
Gadget prototypes are always too good to be true. They promise an amazing set of features, almost always for the low, low price of $99.99. But when it’s time to ship the product, that price tag has either ballooned to $300 or some of the most exciting features have been quietly dropped.
“I have made that mistake,” says Margraff. “Most new entrepreneurs that haven’t gone through the the process are highly likely to fall on the sword.”
That’s why modeling the costs accurately is important, he says. “People make the mistake of just looking at the bill of materials without scrap, labor, overhead and profit, or [forget to] add the cost of marketing,” he says.
Creating a product out of a standard reference design is easy. Differentiation is what costs money, says Chuang.
“It is hard to deviate from the norm,” he says. “The supply chains and ODMs (original design manufacturers) are all used to building what exists and that’s where everything is cost effective.”
Even seemingly small things can add up. Take the pivoting hinge in the litl Webbook. “If you say you want to use a normal hinge but just want it to rotate a little more, it changes everything,” says Chuang.
Most gadgets also will bump up against heightened consumer expectations. Raised on a diet of subsidized $200 smartphones, consumers expect to see polished, sophisticated gadgets for a similar price.
“Smartphones, which have multiple hundreds of dollars in committed subscription standing behind them, have set expectations for that kind of value,” says Tomlin. “And that’s not easy for everyone else to deliver.”
Getting a product into hands of consumers also costs money. “The biggest naivete is how much money gets consumed in the channel,” says Tomlin. “Most of these companies can’t just call up Wal-mart and sell to them. They have to go through a distributor who takes a cut.”
Gadget entrepreneurs warn that it is difficult to get rapid mass-market adoption for a physical device that’s only offered online. If a few hundred early adopters is what you are gunning for, friends and family will always step in. But if you want to sell a product to millions, retail is the way to go, they say.
“The efficiency of the retail distribution channel in the U.S. is unparalleled in the world,” says Margraff.
And to become a part of that channel means throwing some money into the bucket.
“If you have to go through retail distribution, all the middlemen have to be compensated,” says Tomlin. “You have to make sure that cost of product does not balloon.”
A tip: Find a contract manufacturer who is willing to carry the financial burden of inventory, says Tomlin.
Using an independent design firm to create the product, as Arrington did, is standard operating procedure. Even big firms like Dell often work with independent design shops such as New Deal Design to create new products.
But it’s best to work with a firm that lets you retain the rights to your intellectual property, says Chuang. He created the litl Webbook with help from product-design and consulting firm Moto Development Group.
It’s also important to have some hardware competency on your own staff, say entrepreneurs. “That way you don’t end up wrangling over the IP,” says Tomlin.
Just owning the IP isn’t enough to stay ahead in the game, warns Chuang.
“At the end of the day, it is a very fluid market and the IP is a race against time,” he says. “The IP probably won’t protect you in the market for a long period of time, which is why it is necessary to keep a steady stream of innovations coming.”
See Also:
Photo: litl Webbook/litl
Looks like Apple’s lawyers will be extra busy in the coming days. Some entity by the name of St. Clair Intellectual Property Consultants has filed suit against the house that Jobs built, alleging that the iPhone infringes upon several of its patents.
The patents in question have to do with the iPhone’s digital camera. St. Clair is seeking unspecified damages and wants to take the whole thing to trial.
Apple hasn’t said anything about the allegation quite yet.
St. Clair has sued other companies over the same patents in the past, including Canon in 2003 (it won $34 million in damages) and Sony (it won $25 million in damages).
So that’s it, Apple being sued by a company that has won several similar lawsuits in the past.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Section: Communications, Computers, Mobile Computers, Netbooks, Wireless, Features, Originals, Columns, Who's On Crack
This weeks Who’s on Crack has been specially formulated and optimized for tablet computers. Here at WOC (what we call ourselves for short), we believe this tablet thing is really going to catch on someday and we want to be ready for it. Our designers are also hard at work for on a free standing touchscreen PC and a flexible/roll-up style screen that will one day seem as common as weeds in my lawn. Enjoy this special version aimed at our readers using these uber-secret products.
Who needs an actual platform to design for? Not big name magazines such as Conde Naste’s Wired or Sports Illustrated, they’re already showing off tablet versions and are light years ahead of the competition. Whipping up a tablet version of your content will surely take longer than the 3 month lead time the FCC document release usually grants, right?
If we step back for a minute, these guys might as well be designing new headlights for nuclear powered cars that Ford is sure to invent in the next century. Do these big magazines really sit in a room and confess: we need hype: “let’s build something that is hot.” Then the geeky guy at the back of the room reading dirtyapplesecrets.com says, this iTablet thing is going to be huge. Boom, the idea is born.
Or are these magazines so excited for a tablet they are deliberately trying to shame Steve Jobs into making one? As if to say, “Steve, look how awesome the world would be if you just followed the photoshopped renderings of a product you really should make. It would be your legacy, your ascension to mythical status (as if he needs the nudge). Can Apple be shamed into producing the thing?
We know it takes a while for Apple to get something right. Look at the iPod, how many generations did we have to endure before they struck gold with the Nano and Touch? Apple is learning from its ways and supposedly already has a team working on a secluded island on iTablet 2. Actually, that is incorrect, the rumor says Apple has 5 teams, each working in blind seclusion on different parts of iTablet 2, blithely unaware other teams even exist. This is how smart Apple is.
Apple is always one step ahead (at least) of us. If they are late in getting the original iTablet out the door, as we are all building things that are optimized for the iTablet, then they need to have #2 figured out before 1 is out the door. Smart. Think different.
Apple has competition in the vaporware category: Crunchpad. Or at least it did have potential competition in the unreleased product category. Mike Arrington make public the implosion, the crumbling of an idea gone bad: the Crunchpad was dead.
Arrington cited the loss of a pet project due to greed. Greed, for lack of a better term is good (thanks to Gordon Gecko), usually. But here greed seems to not only have put a nail through the Crunchpad tablet but through a budding lifelong friendship. It gets better, the maligned Chandra, er Chandrasekar “Chandra” Rathakrishnan, founder and CEO of Fusion Garage, will be showing off a totally new tablet he designed, alone, in a dark basement without any help from any tech blog: the ChandraPad. The last part I made up, I assume he will show off the CrunchPad following a bushell of legal claims that will push the release date well past the product’s useful life.
I quote the Fake Steve Jobs, “bitch, please. Get some guys, get in your *** cars, and drive over there and beat some *** with baseball bats. Do you not understand this? ... Good God, man, This is hardware.”
Let’s say you are on Diggnation and you want to wow the audience, what do you do? If you’re analyst Alex Albrecht you say, “I was shocked at how cheap the price point is going to be,” referring to the Apple tablet. Not only is this dude claiming he is “in the know” that the thing exists, but he knows its retail story.
Is this confirmation that all our hours spent honing our magazines and even this post for tablets was not a complete waste of everyones time in a dark economy where we really all should be doing something more productive? Surely the bloggers will run with the confirmation, right?
No moron, the bloggers key in on the low price point. How low? Will Apple give the thing away? We are so hyped up that $1,000 sounds like a steal! We are just thrilled the product we know Apple is keeping from us is reasonably affordable. We won’t be eating Ramen for nearly as long as we thought! Hooray. Can we really believe Apple will leave money sitting on the table?
Yes we can. Please pass the rock.
Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile
Those still looking to save a little on a new phone this holiday season may want to check out the new offer from AT&T, well, that is assuming you are interested in a BlackBerry.
This offer is effective immediately and as of now does not seem to have an end date. Or at least there was not an end date mentioned in the press release. That said, better not wait to long, or you will run the risk of missing out.
Anyway, the half-off BlackBerry offer includes the Bold 9700 and the Bold 9000 as well as the Curve 8900, 8520, 8320 and 8310.
Finally, at this point it should almost go without saying, but in order to get this half-off deal you will need to be willing to put up with some mail-in rebates and also sign the standard two-year commitment. But hey, the good part is that you will get a nice BlackBerry for half-price. Well, that is if a BlackBerry is your thing.
Read [AT&T]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Telegraph.co.uk | Manly Droid Strikes Back: New Ads Dismiss iPhone PC World Verizon Wireless' attack on the iPhone has devolved into chest-beating, with a Droid ad that vaguely slams Apple's "beauty" and any phone that's a "tiara-wearing, digitally clueless beauty pageant queen." The ad is full of little quips like that: "It's ... Ad wars: Droid manly; iPhone girly Big marketing budget drives Moto Droid sales iphones Are Princesses, Droid Ad Implies |
Section: Computers, Mobile Computers
Just when we think the CrunchPad is dead and gone, news comes that it will be given a real-world demonstration. Of course, this story now appears to be far from over and I am sure more talk of lawsuits will be coming in the future.
However in the meantime, Chandra Rathakrishnan who is the CEO of Fusion Garage has announced that he will be speaking with reporters and also giving a demo of the device in San Francisco this coming Monday.
Personally, I am still holding out hope of seeing this come to market, that is assuming it comes at the anticipated $300 (or lower) price tag.
Via [Gizmodo]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
The Mirror Watch is both a handy wrist-mounted mirror and a stylish, chunky LED watch, allowing you to stare lovingly at your own visage while covering up your narcissism with the more socially acceptable combo of watch-glance-and-yawn.
The watch is from Hong Kong-based Cheuk Kee Lai, and can be had in brushed stainless steel, black, or with a gold-plate. The shiny front panel works like a mirror until you press it to activate the glowing numbers which shine through from below.
I’m always being asked by the Lady for a quick lend of my iPod Touch, new enough that it’s back is still shiny enough to use as a mirror for some street-side lipstick application. This watch would possibly be more useful, and much less likely to get scratched in use. I can’t be the only one who keeps his iPod in the same pocket as coins and keys. Online store coming soon
Mirror Watch product page [SD Works via Book of Joe]
As if Twitter weren’t already full of utterly bland, mindless codswallop, researchers from Hasselt University in Belgium are about to add the random, idiotic bleatings of a baby to the stream of nonsense. Worse, the baby won’t even know it is broadcasting its brainless, repetitive activities to the world.
Twoddler is a modified Fisher Price activity center, the kind that toddlers have tweaked and poked for what seems like generations. The difference is that this one has its activities monitored by a computer and the activities are translated into Tweets. The example uses a baby called Yorin, and if he spends, say, a few minutes playing with a picture of his mother, this Tweet will be forced on the world: “@mommy_yorin Yorin misses mommy and looks forward playing with her this evening”. Further, if he annoyingly bangs on the bell, over and over, for far too long, the computer will translate this to say “Yorin is showing off his music skills with a new tune”.
The Twoddler uses sensors hooked up to an Arduino circuit and sends the information via the wireless ZigBee protocol to a nearby computer. This is where the signals are converted into human-readable (or at least parent-readable) “words” and sent off to the web using the Twitter API.
We imagine that these incessant, repetitive Tweets will swiftly become as annoying as the behavior which triggers them, negating the whole point of sending Yorin off to the day-care center. There is one advantage to Twoddler over having an actual toddler in the room with you. It may be a bit of a moral conundrum, but at least mom always has the option to un-follow her offspring.
Twoddler Project [Hasselt University via Mashable]
Prison officers in Washington DC have been busted for smuggling gadgets into jail for inmates. According to the Washington Post, the officers have been “placed on administrative leave”.
The officers, Thomas Ford and Quincy Hayes, are accused of sneaking iPods, cellphones and chargers into the District’s Correction Treatment Facility, and taking bribes to do so. We’re not sure about cellphones, but surely there’s not a problem with having iPods on the inside? After all, it stops you getting bored, and as we all know, the Devil makes work for idle hands.
How were these officer’s caught? Some stool-pigeon inmate, presumably jealous that he had nobody to send him even a Zune, grassed them up. An FBI employee, acting on this information, pretended to be an inmate’s brother and arranged to smuggle “a phone, an iPod and a charger” into the facility in exchange for “several hundred dollars”. We hope that this lone charger was at least a universal one.
Cue the inevitable jokes about the tunes loaded onto these iPods. the Washington Post headlines with “Jailhouse Rock”, Nicole Martinelli at the Cult of Mac choses instead “I Fought the Law.” Right now, I am (coincidentally) listening to Eric Clapton’s “I Shot the Sheriff.” We can do better than that. Suggestions in the comments. If you come up with something especially good, I’ll change the headline of this post.
Jailhouse rock: Enter our first-ever contest [Washington Post via Cult of Mac “Jail Guards Charged With Smuggling iPods for Prisoners | Cult of Mac”)]
2 D.C. guards charged in smuggling scheme [Washington Post]
Photo illustration: Charlie Sorrel
Original photo: Decade Null
This week I have been laid low with a wet, spluttering cold and a rather amusing bike polo injury. This means that many of the day’s posts are coming direct from my huge, comfortable bed. It also means that I am very interested in this laptop bed desk from Ikea hacker Andrew.
Andrew, the poor poppet, was suffering greatly from using his computer in the sack. Speaking to the Ikea Hacker blog, he whined “when I was lying down the weight caused some discomfort for my stomach, and while sitting down the position strained my back.” Instead of simply sitting in his bed and crying as he waited for a nice big grown-up to “make it all better”, Andrew stopped feeling sorry for himself for long enough to take a trip to Ikea and buy a Magasin dish-rack. A bit of drilling and a few bolts later and he had a spidery-legged table to keep the heavy laptop off his delicate little belly.
I have no plans to actually make one of these. Instead, I will continue dictating these posts to the Lady, who is selflessly transcribing my cracked wheezings into the words you read here. Try getting you little lap-desk to do that, Andrew. [Cough]. And where’s my coffee, woman?!
Laptop stand for working in bed [Ikea Hacker]
Gadget Lab reader Michael Lowdermilk writes:
Hi Charlie,
Since you’re a power junkie I wanted to get your feedback on what you think about adding USB ports to power outlets.
By “power junkie”, Michael isn’t referring to my constant attempts to wrest control of the Gadget Lab from its esteemed editor (damn your physical fitness and level-headed approach, Tweney — I’ll get you one day). Instead, Michael is talking about my weakness for cleverly designed wall-warts, of which his is one. After some correspondence between us, Michael has at last launched his power outlet, the TruePower, which combines a couple of standard 100V-240V sockets with a pair of USB ports.
These ports are, of course, for charging-only, but given the proliferation of junk that dangles from our computers’ busses these days, there is a real, and obvious, need for something like this. Michael is selling them through Fastmac for $10 a pop, which is cheaper than a USB charger alone, and those double sockets mean that you can hook up both your USB Humping Dog and a USB fan to keep him cool.
TruePower USB Outlet [Fastmac. Thanks, Michael]
See Also:
Call me dorky, but for me the perfect game is one where you also learn something. It may have something to do with the Great British Pub Quiz, which long ago replaced the formal academic examination in UK schools and universities because a) attendance runs to almost 100% and b) you get to drink beer.
So if you, too, prefer to read a how-to article on the web than kill five minutes on yet another tower-defense game, try out Stuff to Rattle Your Brain, a trivia quiz game from the good folks at How Stuff Works. Or rather, don’t. How Stuff Works is an excellent resource for the curious, explaining, amongst other things, how the iPhone works, whether or not Santa is real, and offering videos of such educational items as the two-faced cat (literally two-faced, not metaphorically two-faced like all cats).
But this application looks like any random piece of flung-together junk you’d find amongst the 100,000 apps in the store. There are mis-spellings, and the questions seem to be weasel-worded to make you get them wrong even if you know the answer. For instance, a question from the “computer” category: “A firewall is a barrier to keep destructive forces away from your property. True or false?” If you give the correct answer, “false”, then you will be wrong.
Still, it’s not all bad. Any app which can include this wonderfully non-politically-correct question is fine with me: “Even as babies and children, girls cry more than boys on average?” The answer? True! (Actually, false). You can let the application store your scores online, and questions are refreshed periodically from the internet.
We guess it is still better than a round of Orba, but the brain-rattling in the title is more likely to refer to the frustration it causes than to a genuine mental challenge.
Stuff to Rattle Your Brain [iTunes. Thanks, Katy!]
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Matija Strlic and colleagues note in the new study that the familiar musty smell of an old book, as readers leaf through the pages, is the result of hundreds of so-called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released into the air from the paper. Those substances hold clues to the paper's condition, they say. Conventional methods for analyzing library and archival materials involve removing samples of the document and then testing them with traditional laboratory equipment. But this approach destroys part of the document.
In other words, it's not merely clicking the "I Agree" button that creates the legal contract. The issue turns on reasonable notice and opportunity to review--whether the placement of the terms and click-button afforded the user a reasonable opportunity to find and read the terms without much effort. In practice, the enforceability of each TOS implementation often falls on a sliding scale, depending on the degree of notice it provides the user. At one end, presentations that require the user, before clicking, to scroll to the bottom of a set of terms, or through an adjacent scroll box, guarantees the entirety of the TOS appears at least once, even if the user chooses to ignore it, and has been held to be enforceable. At the other end, by contrast, if a user must click on a hyperlink, or series of hyperlinks, to view the terms, the significance of clicking "I Agree" as showing assent diminishes, depending on the difficulty in actually finding the terms and whether a reasonable Internet User would have done so. Finally, in addition to the placement of terms, courts also consider the inclusion of conspicuous statements on websites that instruct users to read the TOS and inform them of the consequence of clicking "I Agree."...
Earlier today we 