Reuters - Hackers calling themselves the Iranian Cyber Army briefly hijacked the home page of China's top search engine, Baidu Inc, on Tuesday weeks after doing the same thing to Twitter.com. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 12 Jan 2010 | 3:32 am
s122604 sends in a performance review of the Chevy Volt, paying particular attention to what happens after the initial plug-in capacity has been depleted. This reader adds, "The review indicates that the performance is adequate, and perhaps better than anticipated. If the Volt can deliver technically, especially with the possibility that it could retail for less than expected (WSJ subscription may be required), does GM have a potential hit on its hands?" "How well will General Motors' Chevrolet Volt drive once it gets past its 40 mile all-electric driving range and starts to rely on power generated by its gasoline engine? That's been a question for both critics and fans of the Volt, and with just 11 months to go before this car hits the market, I got the answer."
By Evan Ackerman 1080p? Yawn. It’s been done. If high def is the new normal def, what’s the new high def? It’s UHD (Ultra High Definition), which takes 1920 x 1080 full HD and quadruples... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Jan 2010 | 3:19 am
The Italian publisher Apogeo commissioned a professional Italian translation of my Creative Commons-licensed essay collection Content and released their edition as a free, noncommercial download! Content:... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Jan 2010 | 3:18 am
In 2004 everyone freaked out when Gmail launched because Google would be reading your emails to figure out what ads to serve you. “Privacy advocates objected to the advertising model, which involves Google’s robot eyes scanning every e-mail for keywords and displaying contextual advertisements alongside a user’s inbox,” noted Wired.
That might sound familiar to your great-great-great grandparents. Supposedly many people were apprehensive about using telephones in the early 1900s because they knew the phone companies could listen in on their phone calls. There are people who won’t use phones today because of the ease in which calls can be tapped.
But the rest of us seem to be ok with Gmail. And our phone. That’s because the benefits of those products far outweigh the privacy costs. And people are going to be just fine with Facebook, too. Even if they did do a switcharoo on privacy settings a month ago that is still reverberating through the tech press.
Contrary to published reports, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did not say “the age of privacy is over” in my interview with him last Friday evening at the Crunchies. You can watch the video here for yourself. What he said is that he wants Facebook to change with its users, and keep its product fresh. Which is exactly what they are doing.
The fact is that privacy is already really, really dead. Howard Lindzon nailed it the other day when he said “Equifax, Transunion, Capital One, American Express and their cousins raped our privacy,” Everything we do, everything we buy, everywhere we go is tracked and sitting in a database somewhere. Our location via our phone, or our car GPS. Our credit card transactions. Everything. Honestly, a picture of you taking a bong hit in college is mice nuts compared to the mountain of data that is gathered and exploited about every single one of us every single day. You just don’t really see that other stuff because those companies don’t like to talk about the data their gathering. I don’t see an Equifax blog post outlining exactly how they are gathering and selling your information, for example.
The point is that we like Facebook. Very, very few of us are going to stop using it. It was inevitable that they’d rip the bandaid off and try to get their users to make data public. It’s what’s best for Facebook. And if users hate it enough, someone else will launch a competing service that has different policies and thrive. You can guess what the odds of that happening are.
Crazy right? Who’d want to do that? Well, apparently a lot do. The company has let in 2,500 people so far. Those 2,500 people are publishing $200,000 worth of purchases a day to their friends. It’s less than a month old and they’ve tracked $3.8 million in transactions already, with an average transaction size of $46.
And more than 10,000 people are on the waiting list to get an account and gladly share their consumption behavior with the world.
Why are they doing it? To share what they’re buying, and talk about it. Or to let advertisers see what they like and tailor offers to them. Or something. The point is, we don’t really care about privacy anymore. And Facebook is just giving us exactly what we want.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
In 2004 everyone freaked out when Gmail launched because Google would be reading your emails to figure out what ads to serve you. "Privacy advocates objected to the advertising model, which involves Google's... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Jan 2010 | 3:18 am
The Italian publisher Apogeo commissioned a professional Italian translation of my Creative Commons-licensed essay collection Content and released their edition as a free, noncommercial download!
If you’re an old-school gamer, the Sega Genesis (known as Sega Mega Drive outside North America) sure does have a special place in your heart. And if your current job requires you to give away business cards from time to time, this new business card holder that’s shaped like Sega’s legendary 16-bit console might be the right thing for you.
In case you want to go even more retro, there’s also a Space Invaders business card case in red and another one in black now.
Both the Genesis and the Space Invaders cases are made of aluminum. They’ll go on sale in Japan in March, but import/export specialist Geek Stuff 4 U lets people living outside Japan pre-order the cases already (price: $24.30 each).
The Economist magazine has hugely facilitated making global comparisons of real estate prices to income via the following interactive chart. Check it out: Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Jan 2010 | 2:24 am
This past Saturday, Foursquare was averaging more than a check-in a second, according to this tweet from the official account. Some quick math tells me that this means they must have seen over 86,000 check-ins in that 24 hour span. While Foursquare hasn’t publicly stated how many users they have, our best guess is that the number is something around 200,000 (with many following Scoble) and growing fast.
And while that would make Foursquare much smaller than Twitter (which, in turn, is much smaller than Facebook), it makes the check-in numbers even more impressive. That data would seem to indicate that a good number of Foursquare users are actively using it. This lack of use is something that has always been a big criticism of Twitter, for example.
The latest version of Foursquare’s iPhone app, version 1.5, went live in the App Store today. It features some location enhancements, as well as a refreshed UI. Check out the free app here.
Last Friday, the location-based serviceFoursquare announced that it was opening their service to be used anywhere in the world. The following day, they saw the biggest day in terms of usage ever, apparently... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Jan 2010 | 2:22 am
If Reuters Left Second Life for Lack of Important Stories, Why Did They Miss So Many When They Were Here? What New York Times Magazine Gets About Second Life (That Others Often Don't) Second Life's Killer... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Jan 2010 | 2:17 am
After starting strong in a new ratings review of U.S. credit, ratings agency Fitch gets all wobbly by the end. Here is the full press release tonight: Fitch Ratings has today affirmed the United States'... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Jan 2010 | 2:13 am
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Hackers calling themselves the Iranian Cyber Army briefly hijacked the home page of China's top search engine, Baidu Inc, on Tuesday weeks after doing the same thing to Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 12 Jan 2010 | 2:12 am
Apparently there is a halo of dark matter surrounding the Milky Way galaxy -- as there is, indeed, surrounding many other galaxies -- and it bears the improbable shape of a giant beach that's been partially deflated and flattened out, ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 12 Jan 2010 | 2:09 am
An anonymous reader writes "I'm an indie game developer making a clone of a rather obscure old game. Gameplay in my clone is very similar to the old game, and my clone even has a very similar name because I want to attract fans of the original. The original game has no trademark or software patent associated with it, and my clone isn't infringing on the original's copyright in any way (all the programming and artwork is original), but nevertheless I'm still worried about the possibility of running afoul of a look and feel lawsuit or something similar. How do I make sure I'm legally in the clear without hiring an expensive lawyer that my indie developer budget can't afford?"
In messing with residential real estate data tonight, I found that there were only two cities in the U.S. that were not in a bubble in 2005, but were bubbling by 2009. Recall, I'm defining a bubble as... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Jan 2010 | 2:01 am
If you've looked at buying a television the past several years, chances are you're well aware of the terms: Plasma, DLP, LCD, and more recently, OLED. Well, there's a new acronym in town: LPD. Developed... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Jan 2010 | 1:58 am
If you’ve looked at buying a television the past several years, chances are you’re well aware of the terms: Plasma, DLP, LCD, and more recently, OLED. Well, there’s a new acronym in town: LPD.
Developed by the Silicon Valley-based Prysm, LPD is being formally unveiled today as the latest type of screen technology. LPD stands for Laser Phosphor Display, which likely means nothing to you, but the company is promising that it’s a tech that will allow them to create massive, crisp digital displays that consume some 75% less power than the other display technologies. The company claims these displays are also much cheaper to build, and will last longer.
So can they deliver on such promises? It will likely be a while before we as consumers can see, because at first, Prysm is targeting commercial vendors with the tech. They hope that arenas/stadiums, concerts, and big department stores will take advantage of their displays initially. But after that, assuming all goes well, this tech would ideally be available to consumers looking for large screens that consume little power. And following the hoopla of Avatar and some of the tech at CES, these screens are 3D compatible, we’re told.
Of course, the key to that is also pricing, but again, they’re still a ways away from figuring that out for consumers. In fact, all they’ll say on their site is vaguely worded statements such as, “Finally, LPD technology breaks free of the performance limitations of conventional displays by offering high resolution, superb image quality, high brightness and the widest viewing angle at the lowest cost of ownership while consuming the least resources.” That sounds like the best of all worlds. But seeing is believing, and we haven’t seen yet.
Prysm is a company that has actually been flying under the radar for about four years now in Silicon Valley. The privately held company has over 100 employees.
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The following chart shows the ratio of U.S. housing prices to income for various major cities from 1989-2009. If we say bubbles exists in cities where that ratio is more than two standard deviations outside... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Jan 2010 | 1:56 am
2010 AL30 as imaged remotely from Australia on Jan. 11, 2010 (Ernesto Guido & Giovanni Sostero) On Wednesday (Jan. 13), an object called 2010 AL30 will fly by Earth at a distance of 130,000 km (80,000 miles). That's only one-third ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 12 Jan 2010 | 1:31 am
PC World - Bharti Airtel, India's largest mobile services provider, said Tuesday that it will acquire a 70 percent stake in Warid Telecom International, a mobile services operator in Bangladesh. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 12 Jan 2010 | 1:10 am
China has scrapped restrictions on the use of foreign parts in wind power turbines, state media reported, as the nation seeks access to more advanced technology to meet its clean energy... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 12 Jan 2010 | 1:09 am
Who has the ear of the White House when it comes to tech issues? Judging from the White House visitor logs, President Obama and his team have a soft spot for FCC Chair Julius Genachowski, who visited 48 times between June and September. Not that it was all business; Genachowski checked in to use the White House bowling alley and to attend a poetry reading.
Print may be a flat medium, but that has not stopped magazine publishers from trying to add dimension to their pages. For at least a decade, they have been experimenting with bar codes and icons that could take readers to Web sites, trying to add a bit of Internetlike interactivity to their pages.
But the average consumer did not own a bar-code reader — until now.
By Andy Updegrove, Contributor, Consortiuminfo.org
Think of the words “standards war,” and unless you’re a standards wonk like m…oh, never mind…you’re likely to think of the battle between the Betamax and VHS video tape formats. That’s because videos are consumer products that just about everyone uses, and therefore the bloodshed in that standards war was not only shed in public view, but the some of the blood that was shed was shed by the public (i.e., those that bought video players supporting Betamax, the losing, but arguably superior, format). Fast forward (pun intended) to the present, and the trademarks “HD DVD and “Blu-ray” may ring a bell – and that’s no coincidence.
Not a week after the device’s debut, Google’s support forums are rife with complaints from Nexus One owners who are clearly not getting the level of customer support they expect.
Like most other Google (GOOG) offerings, Nexus One support is self-help driven–FAQs, troubleshooting guides and email forms offered with this earnest caveat: “in most cases you won’t receive a personal response.”
That might fly with folks availing themselves of free Google services like search and email, but it doesn’t with those who’ve just spent between $179 and $529 on a new superphone. Buyers expect their devices to work properly out of the box, and if they don’t, they expect their complaints to be approached with at least a modicum of urgency, preferably by a human.
If you buy a Nexus One manufactured by HTC, directly from Google’s Web site, and use it with T-Mobile’s wireless network–who do you call when you have a problem? Google is only accepting support requests via e-mail, and users are getting bounced between T-Mobile and HTC as neither seems equipped to answer complaints, or willing to accept responsibility for supporting the Nexus One.
So while Google’s new Nexus One distribution paradigm might excel in versatility and simplicity, it fails when it comes to support. Which isn’t all that surprising, I suppose. Google was never really set up to provide customer service. That said, you’d think that a company that takes great pride in improving things and making them accessible and useful, would have made more of an effort to do the same for Nexus One customer service.
Did Google launch the Nexus One with a half-assed customer-service solution? I put a variation of this question to the company and here’s what I was told:
What, exactly, was your customer support solution at launch? I’d assumed that you would initially pay the carriers to handle support, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
We developed a dedicated, comprehensive Google customer support team for the Nexus One. Our support site can be found at google.com/phone/support, which has pointers to our help center, where there is lots of troubleshooting information. HTC provides telephone support for device troubleshooting and warranty, repairs, and returns. Google also offers self-help through our help center, user-to-user help through forums, and email support to customers who are unable to find answers to their questions online. We promise to answer email inquiries within 48 hours. T-Mobile USA fields calls regarding their service (including service billing inquiries).
Why was this solution chosen?
Solving customer support issues is extremely important to us, because we want people to have a positive Nexus One experience. Therefore, we felt this was the best approach to quickly resolve any customer support inquiries.
We felt this was the best approach to quickly resolve any customer support inquiries.
Really? Hard to believe that “we promise to answer email inquiries within 48 hours” is “the best approach.” Clearly, it’s not.
That’s great to hear, but it doesn’t really explain why the gap exists in the first place or why Google felt comfortable launching with it.
So what’s the plan going forward? Says a Google spokesperson: “We are working quickly to solve any customer support issues as they come up, and we are trying to be as open and transparent as possible through our online customer help forums. We’ll continue to address all issues in as timely of a manner as possible, and we’re flexible and prepared to make changes to our processes and tools, as necessary, for an optimal customer support experience.”
It involves Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and seemingly every dude who sits behind a desk and kisses up to celebrities for a living at the GE (GE) television network that was just bought by Comcast (CMCSA) .
But, as I noted: “I do love the roundelay of online videos this Tinseltown mess has created.”
And here are more, from Leno, who seems really irked by the meltdown that has tarnished his reputation, although NBC is also flacking the clip too.
Also below is day-time talk show queen Ellen DeGeneres, who mixed the NBC stew in with Simon Cowell announcing he was leaving “American Idol” right before she gets there as a judge.
Facebook and Twitter are, of course, increasingly trying to prove that they can be real, self-sustaining businesses with meaningful revenues, and maybe even consistently positive cash flow. Good for them!
But what about the rest of us — the great unwashed masses of social-media addicts?
The United States is in a tough spot. As we dig ourselves out from a serious financial crisis and a deep recession, our very efforts to recover are exacerbating much more fundamental problems that our country has let fester for too long. Beyond our short-term worries, and behind many of today’s political debates, lurks the deeper challenge of coming to terms with America’s place in the global economic order.
Cirrus Logic (CRUS) late Monday said it now sees revenue for its fiscal third quarter ended December 26 of $65 million, above previous guidance of $58 million to $62 million. The company said the better-than-expected results reflected strong demand for a range of audio products, and modest improvement in demand for energy products.
PARIS, Jan 12 (Reuters) - International Business Machines and French state-owned rail operator SNCF are set to create a joint venture as part of a six-year IT contract worth 1.7 billion euros ($2.47 billion)... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 12 Jan 2010 | 12:50 am
CWmike writes "Microsoft has pulled almost every version of Office from its own online store to comply with a court order requiring it to remove custom XML technology from its popular Word software that starts on Monday. As of mid-day, the only edition available from the Microsoft Store was Office Ultimate 2007, a $670 'full-version' suite. All other Windows editions, as well as Office 2008 for Mac, were accompanied by the message: 'This product is currently unavailable while we update versions on our site. We expect it to be available soon.' Microsoft confirmed that the disappearance of Office was related to the injunction that came out of a patent infringement case the company lost in 2009. 'We've taken steps to comply with the court's ruling and we're introducing the revised software into the US market," said Michael Croan, a senior marketing manager, in an e-mail. He also downplayed the move. 'This process will be imperceptible to the vast majority of customers, who will find both trial and purchase options readily available.'"
More news from the social network Friendster. The site, which was acquired in December by Malaysian payments company MOL Global, has struck a deal with Yahoo Southeast Asia. The purpose of the deal is to integrate product features and cross-promote across both Friendster and Yahoo. Both Friendster and Yahoo stand to gain from the partnership as Friendster has a significant Asian audience and Yahoo also has a steady following in the regional area for certain web services.
Friendster, which was sold for just under $30 million, has over 90 million registered users and 90 percent of its daily traffic coming from Southeast Asia today. The partnership will involve a a new social application built by Friendster that will be prominently displayed on Yahoo Southeast Asia properties and a cross-promotion of Yahoo products on Friendster.
Yahoo Search will also feature results from Friendster user profiles and fan profiles, similar to the deals struck with Twitter and Facebook by the search giants. Friendster users will also be able to link their Friendster account to their Yahoo! account to share their Friendster network activity updates and inbox via their Yahoo accounts. So, users can check their Friendster account and send updates directly from their Yahoo homepage. Users will also be able to publish their Friendster network activity to Yahoo Messenger and other Yahoo applications.
The cross promotion between Friendster and Yahoo has already been implemented but the search results and activity update integration will be rolled out over the next few months.
Friendster, which was founded in 2001, has raised over $45 million in venture capital to date, and is sitting on some potentially lucrative IP. Friendster is no longer hot in the U.S. and still has members in the Asia/Pacific region. The social network, which just rolled out a much-needed redesign, appointed Richard Kimber as its new CEO, who used to head Sales and Operations in South East Asia for Google.
The partnership makes sense; and Friendster should be doing everything it can to try to own the user base in Southeast Asia, considering that the social network is performing poorly in other parts of the world.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Chloe, owner of Portland's brilliant zine store READING FRENZY and impressaria of the line-art zine CRAP HOUND writes, "Boing Boing and Cory in particular have always been very supportive and enthusiastic about Crap Hound -- the sporadically published vintage line art zine my friend Sean Tejaratchi edits and I publish. We have 3 issues slated for publication this year and are using Kickstarter to raise funds to get the first one to press. Our project is currently 17% funded with 35 days to go."
I just kicked in. I've loved Crap Hound since the first issue (and Sean and I apparently shared a passion for Local Hero, where the characters use the term as an epithet; I used it as the title for my first professionally published short story).
Marc Hedlund sez, "Wesabe just open sourced a project called Grendel that makes it easy for web apps to encrypt data using the user's login password, and only decrypt that data when the user is logged in. Let's say you're using a word processing web app and don't want your documents stored plaintext -- the web app could use Grendel to easily encrypt your docs for you, using OpenPGP. Log in and you can edit; log out and only you can get at the data again (since only you have your password). There are some hooks for encrypting with multiple keys if you want to share docs with selected other users on the system. Since people are throwing a ton of sensitive data in web apps these days I think having some tools to help make that safer would be a good thing."
Of course, data on web sites is usually shared with at least some other people in some way. Sometimes a user might want to share their information with the web site support staff, so the staff can help solve a problem or fix a bug. Or, the user might want to share their sensitive data with selected other users on the site, such as coworkers or family members. Grendel allows this, letting you encrypt data with multiple keys so that more than one user's password can gain access.
It's very easy to screw up when building a cryptography system -- check out Nate Lawson's excellent Google Tech Talk on common crypto flaws, or Matasano's Socratic dialog on similar topics, for a map of the pitfalls available to you, and us. We've been fortunate at Wesabe to have a number of people who think very carefully about security, and they've put a lot of effort into designing and building Grendel. That said, we have two goals in open sourcing Grendel: first, to make a tool available to others that could help make "cloud" applications in general much safer for everyone, and second, to open up what we've built so others can review and help us improve it. We would love comments on any aspect of Grendel, security or otherwise.
Kheldon writes "The MMO Gamer sits down with Joe Morrissey, a Senior Designer at Paragon Studios, to discuss the inspiration behind, and current implementation of the Architect user-generated content system in City of Heroes. Quoting: 'Really for me, wanting tools so the rest of the team could actually come up with content was the idea. Because we have a lot of guys on the team that are hardcore players, they play the game all the time. Then they come to me like, "I’ve got this idea for this story, we should really do this arc with this guy!" And I’m like, "That’s great. I haven’t got time to do it. I’ve got plenty of other story arcs to work on." But, if we made the tools easy enough, then they could actually come up with the arcs, and we can put them out. Then somewhere along that road it dawned on me: Why stop with the rest of the team?'"
My latest Locus column, "Close Enough for Rock 'n' Roll," discusses the way that the net makes it possible to do something almost as good as its offline equivalent for a fraction of the cost, and how that changes everything:
In other words, rock 'n' roll is cheap, experimental and fluid, and devotes most of its energy into the production of music. Orchestral music is expensive, formal and majestic, but tithes a large portion of its effort to coordination and overheads and maintenance.
If the Internet has a motif, it is rock 'n' roll's Protestant Reformation thrashing against the orchestral One Church. Rock 'n' roll gets lots of wee kirks built in every hill and dale in which parishioners can find religion in their own ways; choral music erects majestic cathedrals that humble and amaze, but take three generations of laborers to build.
The interesting bit isn't what it costs to replicate some big, pre-Internet business or project.
The interesting bit is what it costs to do something half as well as some big, pre-Internet business or project.
The British lawyer who married the widow of Tintin creator Hergé has successfully sued Bob Garcia ("a detective novelist, jazz musician and Tintin aficionado") for £35,000 for printing five short essays in appreciation of Tintin, two of which were illustrated with brief clips from the comic. The essays were distributed for free, and the two pamphlets with Tintin illustrations were printed about 500 times each.
Nick Rodwell, the plaintiff, was accused by Garcia of "a ruthless drive to kill off their harmless and not-for-profit passion in his bid to keep exclusive control of the Tintin brand."
Britain's "fair dealing" offers less protection to fans and scholars than does the US's "fair use" (itself a complicated doctrine). Combined with a litigious copyright owner, it's a recipe for disaster when it comes to free speech, scholarship, and fan activity.
Hundreds of Tintin fans have already backed Mr Garcia, who on Thursday called for a boycott of the film and claimed that many supporters were heeding his demand. More than 500 people have joined his page on the Facebook website which expresses "anger and disgust" over the issue. More supporters have also backed his cause on other websites.
Mr Garcia said: "We have nothing against Mr Spielberg even if there is a boycott threat against his film ... but are asking him to intervene in favour of not just me but all people who are being prevented from sharing their passion for Tintin..."
Stéphane Steeman, who ran the Hergé Friendship Club for 25 years, has just released a book in which he castigates Mr Rodwell for trying to kill off his organisation, called The Escalation.
He recounts how Mr Rodwell in his blog implies that two Belgian journalists criticised him because they could not pass on their passion for Tintin to their children as they were autistic.
Pierre Assouline, Hergé's French biographer, wrote that he "knows only too well" the "methods" of Mr Rodwell with his "victims".
Mochi Media, a Flash game advertising network and payments platform funded by Accel Partners and Shasta Ventures, has been acquired by Shanda Games for $60 million in cash and $20 million in equity. The company has raised $14 million over two venture rounds.
The deal will be announced shortly.
Shanda is China’s largest operator of online games, with nearly 10 million active accounts. The company hosts so-called MMORPGs, or massively multi-player online role-playing games, under which users pay monthly subscriber fees as well as purchase items within the game. The company went public on NASDAQ late last year and has the enviable ticker symbol GAME.
As of June 2009 100 million people were playing games that included Mochi Media. They also launched a payments platform for game developers last year.
The company was close to being acquired last year, but an internal battle between the founders and investors led to a scrapping of that deal. Shortly afterwards the hired executive team left to other ventures. And the Mochi Media founders took over management of the company again.
Shanda also acquired Goldcool Games earlier this month, a Shanghai-based online game developer and operator. Goldcool Games currently operates two MMORPGs, “Hades Realm” and “Dukes and Lords.” The company also has several MMORPGs in the pipeline, including “Dragon Heir,” “Zodiac Tales,” “Martial Glory” and “Hades Realm II.”
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Um, yuck. A new study has found that a little less than half of sodas poured from fountains in the Roanoke, Virginia area are contaminated with coliform bacteria, an indicator of fecal contamination. According to the work, published in the ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 11 Jan 2010 | 10:11 pm
brilanon writes "Telepathic-critterdrug is a controversial fork of the open source artificial-life sim Critterding, a physics sandbox where blocky creatures evolve neural nets in a survival contest. What we've done is to give these animals an extra retina which is shared with the whole population. It's extended through time like a movie and they can write to it for communication or pleasure. Since this introduces the possibility of the creation of art, we decided to give them a selection of narcotics, stimulants and psychedelics. This is not in Critterding. The end result is a high-color cellular automaton running on a substrate that thinks and evolves, and may actually produce hallucinations in the user."
Above, Stormtrooper striptease Courtney Cruz in a Star Wars-themed burlesque show at the Los Angeles club Bordello (a sexy bar which opened at the site of a notorious, historic LA whorehouse). Liz Ohanesian has a post up at LA Weekly with more about the performance. Lots of great photos by Shannon Cottrell, who shot the image above. I did not post Sexy Jabba the Hutt, and you can thank me for it later. (thanks, Isaac B2)
This guest post is written by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, the founder and CEO of WatchMojo, a leading producer of premium, informative and entertaining video content. The company’s catalog of 5,000 videos has generated over 105,000,000 streams since 2006. Today, WatchMojo streams nearly 10 million videos each month and reaches 20,000,000 consumers online and offline.
Party like it’s 1999?
Online video is where search was in 1999: a major part of the digital media ecosystem is desperately looking for a business model and a leading ad format. We know what happened in search, while the early leaders ditched search-as-a-business for portaldom, Google stayed the course and built a $200 billion company.
Search captures intent, video captures interest. Intent offers advertisers a short-term benefit, interest a more long-term value. Perhaps that is why it is taking longer for online video revenues are materialize in a major way.
Yet, over the past year, online video consumption has soared threefold and it appears that this might be the year that the medium grows up and sees its revenues take off too (fingers crossed). This explains why in boardrooms large and small, everyone is trying to crystallize their online video strategy.
Old media and video: Those who can won’t, those who want can’t
When it comes to traditional media companies and online video: those who can won’t, those who want can’t.
Print media would love to ramp up video efforts, but they can’t because it’s not a natural part of their DNA, operations or culture.
Conversely, while television media companies can transition online, they won’t because it cannibalizes their larger offline revenue streams. To TV executives, online video is what the Web was to print media a decade ago: those who embraced it didn’t fare that well; those who shunned it died.
Lost in time
Last year marked the first drop in online advertising revenues since 2002: a 4.2% decline according to eMarketer. Combined with the economic meltdown, media executives had the knee-jerk reaction to knee-cap free, ad-supported content in favor of subscriptions.
Two years ago, the Wall Street Journal was considering going totally free. Now suddenly everyone wants to erect pay walls. Problem is by the time these tactics are implemented, advertising will return faster than ever and old media will once again find itself on the wrong side of the equation.
The main difference between now and then
In 2000, when the Nasdaq crashed, it dried up the advertising money that venture-backed startups were spending online. Traditional marketers had yet to really experiment with online advertising. Today, as marketers start increasing advertising spending again, they are shifting more money to online at the expense of traditional media: Pepsi will shun Super Bowl advertising in favor of social media.
Social media and UGC changes things, sort of
Social media has changed the rules of engagement in news and publishing. But when it comes to ad-supported models, marketers will never feel 100% comfortable advertising alongside user-generated content.
This is why professional content remains the key ingredient to capturing those advertising dollars.
Where video and text diverge
Unlike articles, you can’t fool audiences as easily with videos. It’s easier to get away with a slapdash article than with a slapdash video. Thus, most of the existing online video content relies on “talking head” footage and Q&A formats which are relatively simple to produce. Most of the videos that pass for professionally produced videos should be articles. No wonder marketers remain hesitant to underwrite the genre.
Fiction vs. Non Fiction
Even non-fiction video content needs to be demonstrative (vs. descriptive). Meanwhile, chasing hits with fiction remains too speculative; the risk/reward benefit makes it prohibitive online. Producers who understand this will have an edge over time as budgets shift to video.
Premium vs. Super premium
Naturally, not all online video content is created or valued equally. Traditional media companies produce super premium content. Web producers try to create premium content. However, both are professional.
While marketers will pay more for super premium content (which explains why Hulu commands a large premium in ad rates over the industry standard), online audiences tend to favor Web content whose format and style is more in tune with their more fickle tastes.
As such, those who mold their Web content offerings by mapping out super premium catalogs will also create more valuable libraries. While you cannot match production values, you should offer marketers the same value proposition, adjusted for the ROI that advertisers have come to expect from digital media.
The branded content hype
Branded content holds much promise. But it might be myopic to think that audiences will remain engaged with marketing videos disguised as entertainment. Advertorials in print media have long been a part of the magazine experience, but audiences have learned to bypass them.
Over time, the content itself filters audiences for advertisers. Advertising cannot fully replace or become the content outright. But producers who tastefully weave commerce into content will win.
Ultimately, the Field of Dreams approach might be more realistic: create content that you are passionate about and people want to watch, build an audience and then monetize it. We all want advertisers to pay for content before it’s green lit, but that doesn’t mean it will happen.
Licensing vs. Ad-supported
Of course, getting paid for content is ideal. But consumers will never pay for it online, so find other media companies who will. To be able to become a supplier of content to other media companies and maintain the Field of Dreams philosophy, producers need to balance a) quantity, b) quality, c) frequency and d) consistency.
Getting paid for content by other companies is especially important with video content because even large media businesses are having trouble generating meaningful video advertising revenues.
Finally, to position for the day when video advertising becomes material, producers need to consider e) timeliness. Returning to the search parallel, what good did market share do in 1999 when queries weren’t being monetized? Creating so-called evergreen content gives one’s catalog a longer shelf life, which in turn protects against the short-term weakness in revenues and the long-term “build vs. buy” dilemma that old media (and eventual M&A acquirers) need to go through.
Even if you don’t take advice, learn from it
But that’s not enough. Companies will pay a supplier if they also offer f) variety.
About.com founder Scott Kurnit once gave me the best advice I didn’t fully heed. He cautioned me against covering too many categories. I didn’t take his advice, but made sure that if we did want to offer clients variety, then each category’s clips should be as good as what any best-of-breed producer offers.
Today, I think we do that. As we mark WatchMojo’s four-year anniversary and celebrate crossing the 100,000,000 cumulative video stream mark, we’ve learned that sometimes, you really have to go against the institutional imperative and find your own path in order to survive.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
The folks at the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine are looking for feedback on how to respond to a recent cease & desist letter. While they reside in the Netherlands, and cease & desist letters are not equivalent to litigation and in fact do not always have a legal leg to stand on, it still seems important to consider the implications. This comes after suicidemachine.org's IP was blocked by Facebook. Similar service/software art Seppukoo, who were similarly issued a cease & desist and have issued this response.
"On behalf of Facebook, the law firm
Perkins Coie has sent a Cease and Desist letter to Mike van Gaasbeek
from WORM , the Rotterdam-based experimental arts
center of which MODDR_labs , creators of the Web
2.0 Suicide Machine , are a part of.
Suggestions for competent legal defendants for WORM/MODDR would be
welcome. As a non-profit organization with roots in improvised and
electronic music and avant-garde filmmaking, WORM encounters this
situation for the first time. (Other media arts institutions wouldn't
have legal defense strategies ready in their desk drawers either.)"
BB reader John asks, "Can either of these services be subjected to the contracts that bind users and developers who use the Connect API from scraping data?"
More about the Suicide Machine, and Facebook's efforts to block it: NPR, WSJ.
Oh Nextel. The insults continue. First, your service continues to hemorrhage users, and now you get subjected to phones that look like the Motorola Brute. It’s almost enough to make me feel a little sorry for you.
The Brute i680 is an iDEN compatible, Mil-Spec phone, which explains its striking appearance. It’s actually designed to be resistant to dust, shock, vibration, moisture, solar radiation, and pretty much anything else you can think of to throw at it. Unlike most Nextel phones, it’s also got a few newer features like Bluetooth, and aGPS. If you want one, you can get it now from Sprint for $119.99 on contract.
Time to save the date! Word is out that the sequel to the JJ Abrams Star Trek movie will be out on July 29th, 2012. What we don’t know as of yet is exactly who the director will be.
That’s right, despite the fact that JJ Abrams pretty much made the Star Trek relaunch work through pure force of will, he will not be returning to direct. That’s a bit worrisome, considering the quality of the script that he was able to polish up a bit. Of course, it’s just a little bit early to start being cynical so we should probably just sit back and wait it out.
Imagine this. You get to the airport, get your boarding pass, wait in line for security, and just when you’re about through, a polite man comes over to you and asks if you could come aside for a moment. But instead of ushering you to a white room and telling you to assume the position, he merely observes you closely and then asks you to take an aspirin. You see, the infra-red cameras have detected a slight fever. Yes, only in Japan.
Japan is very concerned for its citizens’ safety; but instead of concocting ineffective security measures, they are enforcing preventative care in that playplace of infection, the airport. I suppose it’s a bit of an invasion of privacy, but no more than x-raying your bags or getting millimeter wave pictures of your junk. They have infra-red cameras set up to pick out people who may be a little hotter than normal, and in extreme cases where an fever actually seems present, they may actually escort you to a hospital to be treated.
It’s an interesting idea to extrapolate to other devices: imagine if computers had low-res IR cameras that would detect a high temperature and advise you to medicate? Or a larger camera mounted in a nursery or children’s ward, which could easily monitor temperature without constant probing with thermometers?
Earlier today, The Rumpus published a very revealing interview with someone claiming to be a Facebook employee. The interview covers a variety of subjects, including privacy restrictions at the world’s largest social network and some of the technological hurdles the site has to deal with. The biggest revelations? That Facebook collects more data about your habits than you may realize, and that there was once a ‘master password’ that would grant employees access to anyone’s Facebook profile — a password that some employees abused.
The interview wasn’t authorized by Facebook, and there are many who are doubting its authenticity. We’ve heard some rumors that the interview is legit, and The Rumpus’ editor stands behind it. For what it’s worth, much of it rings true to me — none of the ‘facts’ revealed are surprising or difficult to believe. Here are some of the highlights:
Facebook is recording data on everything you do on the site. Everything. And not just the messages you’ve written and received either: it knows how many times you’ve clicked on your friend’s profile, which photos you’ve viewed, and more. Using this data it can establish who your best friends are, which helps it generate interesting stories in your News Feed. According to the interview, this data has recently been used to streamline search (your best friends show up first as your type in your query, rather than an alphabetical list).
There was a master password that granted Facebook employees access to any account, if they knew it. The interviewee describes a password that would allow a Facebook employee to view anyone’s profile simply by typing in their unique user ID and the password (the password itself was a variation on ‘Chuck Norris’). This password was used primarily for engineering purposes, but other employees could find it “if they knew where to look”. To use the password, you would have to be accessing Facebook from the company’s ISP (in other words, there was no risk of it leaking to the web at large). The employee says that this power has been abused on at least two occasions, explaining that she is aware of two relating firings.
The employee says that even the use of a master password is unneeded if you’re looking to access private data, because employees can simply query the database:
See, the thing is — and I don’t know how much you know about it — it’s all stored in a database on the backend. Literally everything. Your messages are stored in a database, whether deleted or not. So we can just query the database, and easily look at it without every logging into your account. That’s what most people don’t understand.
Finally, while the interviewee says the ‘master password’ has been deprecated, employees can still access your profile through a special tool, but they need to provide a reason for why they’re doing it. If they get audited down the line and fail to provide an explanation, they can be fired.
The rest of the interview is well worth reading. It covers Facebook’s international expansion, the efforts of one developer to create ‘Hyper-PHP”, and more.
Could the whole interview be a hoax? Sure. The interviewee apparently got some of their stats wrong, but frankly I doubt many Facebook employees can spout off the site’s membership and data storage figures off the top of their head. Here’s the statement Facebook gave us:
“This piece contains the kind of inaccuracies and misrepresentations you would expect from something sourced “anonymously”, and we’ll leave it at that.”
Reading between the lines, if Facebook was able flatly deny the claims made in the interview I suspect they would have. Instead it is trying to undermine the credibility of the article without pointing out any facts that were incorrect. And even if the interview itself is fake, I still think much of what was discussed rings true.
I’ve heard multiple times that Facebook employees can access your profile for security reasons, and they face the threat of being fired should they abuse that privilege. And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the restrictions around these tools were much laxer a few years ago. These ‘Big Brother’ tools are very common at the social sites around the web, so Facebook would hardly be an anomaly in this case.
One final note: if the interview is legitimate, I suspect many of the facts were fabricated to conceal the identity of the interviewee. The article’s author, Phil Wong, has apparently only contributed a single post to The Rumpus (he may well not exist). The article says that Wong visited Facebook headquarters, which means that the company would certainly have a record of who he was there to visit, which would likely reveal the source’s identity. If the interview ever took place, Wong has either done a bad job covering his tracks or some of these details have been made up.
Every day I troll SEC Form D Filings to discover new startups, fundings and investments. I put everything I find into CrunchBase. For everyone else I give you the daily digest, a quick hit of the latest and greatest SEC Form D filings in the TechCrunch sphere:
Nicira - Virtual Data Center Control Software
TopTenREVIEWS - Product Research and Reviews
Tangerine Solar - Community Solar Power Project
Powered - Social Media and Marketing
theodp writes "Barred from using lead in children's jewelry because of its toxicity, some Chinese manufacturers have been substituting the more dangerous heavy metal cadmium in sparkling charm bracelets and shiny pendants being sold throughout the US, an AP investigation shows. Charms from 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' bracelets were measured at between 82 and 91 percent cadmium, and leached so much cadmium that they would have to be specially handled and disposed of under US environmental law if they were waste from manufacturing. Cadmium, a known carcinogen, can hinder brain development in the very young. 'There's nothing positive that you can say about this metal. It's a poison,' said the CDC's Bruce Fowler. On the CDC's priority list of 275 most hazardous substances in the environment, cadmium ranks No. 7. Jewelry industry veterans in China say cadmium has been used in domestic products there for years. Hey, at least it doesn't metabolize into GHB when the little tykes ingest it."
Gentlemen, start your Photoshopping! Here we have the first of the iSlate fakes, similar to the older iSlate fakes. What makes this fake? All the icons are distorted and its showing ugly people in iPhoto. Apple never shows pictures of ugly people.
Northwestern University researchers have developed compact, mid-infrared laser diodes that generate more light than heat — a breakthroughs in quantum cascade laser efficiency.The results are an important step toward use of quantum cascade lasers in a variety of applications, including remote sensing of hazardous chemicals.The research, led by Manijeh Razeghi, the Walter P. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 11 Jan 2010 | 7:04 pm
Nyko, proprietor of fine gaming peripherals, showcased several new items at CES. For the Wii we have the upgraded Wand+, the Type Pad wireless keypad, the Perfect Shot pistol grip attachment, and the Charge Base Quad charging station. We also have a media hub for the PS3 Slim, and a new personal headset/speaker combo for the Xbox 360.
First the Wii stuff. The Wand+ is Nyko’s latest replacement for the standard Wii Remote. Other than being fully compatible Wii Motion Plus games without needing an extra dongle, it doesn’t have a whole lot of extra functionality that the standard remote doesn’t. As you can see above it is slightly smaller, although the buttons have been enlarged a bit. It rests comfortably in your hand, does what it’s supposed to, and doesn’t suck. It comes in the two designer colors you see, for $39.99.
The Type Pad is an interesting attachment, applicable mostly to those who browse the web a lot on their Wii. The QWERTY keypad is within easy reach of your thumbs, and the A and B buttons become triggers on the underside. It fits both Nyko’s wand series and the standard remote. No extra batteries needed, it’ll leech power straight from the remote. $29.99 if you just absolutely need a full keyboard for your Wii experience.
And speaking of power, the Charge Base Quad let’s you recharge four controllers at once, either the Wand or original. One cool thing is that complete contact between the remote and the charger isn’t necessary to charge, meaning you don’t have to take off any gel cases or the like. There’s also a USB port on the base so you can charge your phone, beard trimmer, etc. all for just $49.99.
Okay, if you really need me to explain this product, I’m not sure what I can tell you. It’s a gun. For your Wii. It’s $14.99. It works.
Now we make a quick delve into the Playstation realm. If you were disappointed the PS3 Slim reduced the number of USB slots, you’re in luck. This media hub attachment will give you 4 USB ports, a media card reader for SD and Sony memory sticks, and an IR remote to control DVD and Blu-ray playback. They run $24.99 a pop.
And from the PS3 we bounce over to its mortal enemy, the Xbox 360. The SpeakerCom 360 is a combination headset and loudspeaker, so you can share you profanity laden Xbox Live conversations with the whole room. It requires a single AAA battery, and the backs of the earbuds are magnetic. I personally prefer an actual headset for gaming, so the weight isn’t on my ears. But to each their own. $19.99.
There are no words. This is the most egregious product-biting I’ve ever seen. Even worse than Super Shrek Brothers. Just watch the video and be amazed at the dedication that Chinese knockoff artists have to their craft. Apologies if there’s an ad before, that’s not us.
Do not expect UFC to look the other when it comes to online piracy of its various pay-per-view events. Dana White, the company's president, recently told the Vancouver Sun that he and the UFC will do whatever it takes to eliminate piracy. "It’s gonna cost us a lot of money, but guess what, it’s gonna cost [the pirates] a lot of money. It’s gonna get to the point where it’s like, f*ck it, maybe we shouldn’t pirate MMA anymore." This is not a very forward-thinking way of looking at the problem, no.
It was only a few weeks ago that I first made mention of UFC's efforts against piracy. The gist of the argument was, just let it happen and concentrate on maintaining the company's momentum. The UFC doesn't want to end up like the music industry, having sued its fans into indifference, if not antagonism, toward its product.
Do not expect UFC to look the other when it comes to online piracy of its various pay-per-view events. Dana White, the company’s president, recently told the Vancouver Sun that he and the UFC will do whatever it takes to eliminate piracy. “It’s gonna cost us a lot of money, but guess what, it’s gonna cost them [pirates] a lot of money. It’s gonna get to the point where it’s like, fuck it, maybe we shouldn’t pirate MMA anymore.” This is not a very forward-thinking way of looking at the problem, no.
It was only a few weeks ago that I first made mention of UFC’s efforts against piracy. The gist of the argument was, just let it happen and concentrate on maintaining the company’s momentum. The UFC doesn’t want to end up like the music industry, having sued its fans into indifference, if not antagonism, toward its product. It seems to me that, in the interest of the greater good, the UFC should ignore the streams that pop up. The greater good, of course, being continued and long-term growth at the expense of short-term profit (or, worse, revenge, because the tone Dana White has here screams nothing if not vengeance.)
(Keep in mind that there’s no telling how many of these illegal streams are set up overseas where copyright laws are non-existent. There’s no telling how many of these streams are watched in countries where the local population has no other exposure to UFC, where they can’t buy an official stream for $10 per show. Why not let these people get a taste now, and in a few years’ time, when you’ve built up an international distribution infrastructure, come in and offer them legal ways of watching your content? Maybe hire Shane McMahon to figure that out? What, the ol’ “I didn’t pay for this before, so I’m not going to pay for it now?” song and dance? Those people aren’t your fans, nor will they ever be. Don’t worry about them.)
There’s a few more things to consider. The year 2009 was the company’s biggest grossing year on record, with a record 7.755 million PPV buys over the course of the year. That’s around $349 million in PPV revenue alone. Arguing that a couple hundred (or even thousand) people watching an illegal stream will ruin the company is a stretch at best. That number, $349 million, is likely to be the biggest number of any company of any sport on PPV ever, even bigger than boxing in its heyday (though boxing has been putting higher profile fights on plain ol’ HBO in order to grow an audience). There’s every reason to believe that 2010 will be even bigger, particularly if current UFC Heavyweight Champion Brock Lesnar can get healthy. A fight between Lesnar and, say, Frank Mir would do extraordinary numbers on pay-per-view. That’s them up there, by the way.
Needless to say, the UFC is doing just fine.
This all started when the UFC filed suit against a Boston bar last week for showing an illegal live stream of the game. Yes: the bar literally hooked a laptop up to its TVs and had patrons watch that. Not only is that incredibly stupid on the bar’s part (the bar said that someone had set it up without its knowledge, which is incredibly difficult to believe), but, really, who wants to see an Internet live stream blown up onto a TV? It must have looked horrible. UFC wants $640,000 in damages. I hope it gets every single penny.
UFC plans to combat the scourge of live streams by sending subpoenas to Web sites that ask for every single IP address that connected to the stream. Then UFC would go after those IP addresses, just like the RIAA did back in the day. Never mind that I (or anyone with a modicum of tech-savvy) could spoof my IP address with my hands tied behind my back. Never mind that people could just connect to the stream using any number of anonymizers. And what if you live in an apartment building with a bunch of open Wi-Fi access points, or, just as bad, encrypted only with WEP? A ne’er-do-well could hide his identity any number of ways. An IP address is not someone’s unique genetic code, so let’s stop pretending it is.
Then think of the possible backlash. For all the money UFC is going to spend in and around the legal system by going after alleged pirates—and how long would we have to wait till it sues a single mother with three children, the oldest of whom connected to a stream for a moment just to see what all the fuss was about?—does the cost-to-benefit analysis work out? Maybe it does, I don’t know.
I don’t want it to sound like I’m defending the streams, I’m merely saying that it seems crazy to me to risk becoming the RIAA of this decade in order to prove a point. The UFC has every right to go after people who pirate its content, but it really ought to think about wether or not it’s even worth the trouble. Lawsuits didn’t eliminate music piracy. No, it was the proliferation of easy-to-use, legal alternatives (initially iTunes several years ago, and now things like the Zune Pass and Spotifiy and Pandora) that marginalized music piracy.
Suing everyone under the sun is not a method I would recommend to companies that are looking to grow.
This year’s Consumer Electronics Show was a little muted (largely thanks to Google, who announced its Nexus One aka iPhone clone right before the convention) but there were diamonds in the rough. In this edition of the Wired video podcast, senior editor Dylan Tweney sums up the highlights — as well as the lowlights — of CES 2010.
3-D TVs dominated the show floor, with fancy sets showcased by almost every major video manufacturer including Sony, LG, Toshiba and Panasonic. Our favorite was the Cell TV from Toshiba — a set packed with multiple eight-core processors to convert standard 2-D video into 3-D. Wowzers.
E-book readers of many flavors also flooded the show floor. Plastic Logic’s Que was a noteworthy item with its especially large 8.5-inch screen — like a sheet of Letter-sized paper.
We oo-ed and ahh-ed at a particular Samsung notebook. What’s so great about it? Its 14-inch screen is a 40-percent transparent OLED display, so you can see right through it — kind of like that awesome tablet in Avatar.
Another notebook that caught our eye was Lenovo’s Skylight “smartbook” — a netbook with a smartphone processor promising 8-hour battery life — mostly because it was the freshest looking mini note on the block.
As for lowlights, we dissed on long-winded keynotes put on by Microsoft and Sony, companies who could both use some lessons in showmanship. We also rolled our eyes at custom celebrity gadgets from Lady Gaga, P Diddy and even Ed Hardy.
This episode of the Wired video podcast was produced by Annaliza Savage with editing by Michael Lennon, audiowork by Fernando Cardoso, camerawork by John Ross and still photos by Jonathan Snyder.
One of the key features of the Nexus One has nothing to do with its hardware. The latest and greatest Android phone also is the first device to come with the new Android 2.1 OS. And while other phones, like the Droid, are going to get it too (likely later this month), for now, if you want to play around with it, you’ll need a Nexus One. Or, starting today, you can also download the Android 2.1 SDK.
As noted on the Android Developers Blog, the team is releasing it before most devices have it so that developers can play around with and build for the new features introduced in 2.1. Though Google calls 2.1 a “minor platform release” over Android 2.0, there are a number of new elements such as voice recognition, live wallpapers, a new launcher, more home screens, and some WebKit changes. Those who have ported it over to the Droid note that the new OS is also faster.
Google also notes that there is a new USB manager available through the SDK Manager that supports the Nexus One. This may or may not be related to the new services that it seems like Google wants to include with the device, such as a new docking station for backing up your data.
Firefox version 3.6 is the first major update since 3.5, which was released approximately 6 months ago. Several new features await us, such as Personas (allows changing of the browser’s appearance with a click of a button), performance improvements, new web technologies, and better third party application support.
If you feel like you’re in the mood of testing out the release candidate, you don’t have to worry about future updates. The software will automatically update itself, and will eventually be exactly the same as the final Firefox 3.6 release itself.
I feel like I’m missing something important with this concept. It appears that the keyboard slides out from the bottom of the monitor, but there’s no way to orientate it the way a keyboard should be. I’m not crazy, right? It looks like it only comes out vertically? I guess it’s still a concept, so they’ve got some time to work it out, but man, I wouldn’t type on a vertical keyboard for all the tea in China.
See what I mean? Is there any support there?
I would have stayed to ask, but they were being cagey about their other concept products, so I left in a huff.
Biologists are still sorting out the basics of how to turn stem cells into regenerative therapies, yet foreign clinics are offering stem cell "cures" for conditions such as autism, MS and Parkinson's disease.
Ashton Kutcher made his name being a dweeb and then a punk. But he's one of the sharpest guys in Hollywood when it comes to social media, and is probably the future of video. Seriously.
mdsolar writes "The decrepit nuclear reactor Vermont Yankee has sprung a radioactive leak similar to those at other poorly run reactors in Illinois (Braidwood, Byron and Dresden), Arizona (Palo Verde), and New York (Indian Point). Greenpeace noted 3 years ago that radioactive tritium leaks even threaten Champagne from France. Tritium and its decay product helium 3 are incredibly valuable and there is currently a shortage of helium 3. What, besides shutting down leaky old nuclear plants, could be done to better control release of tritium into the environment?"
I question the actually utility of this, except for in corporate ID badging. It is cool though, combining OLED, RFID, and 3D into an ID. Plus, how is that for an alphabet soup of acronyms?
Move over Cape Canaveral. There's a new player in town able to launch people into space. Jacksonville, Florida's Cecil Field became the country's eighth commercial spaceport on Monday, after a four-year effort to win an operator's license from the Federal ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 11 Jan 2010 | 5:22 pm
CNN is reporting on findings from a Freedom of Information request initiated by the Electronic Privacy Information Center that has revealed that, contrary to public statements by the Transportation Security Agency, full-body scanners can store and transmit images. "In the [FOIA] documents, obtained by the privacy group and provided to CNN, the TSA specifies that the body scanners it purchases must have the ability to store and send images when in 'test mode.' ... 'There is no way for someone in the airport environment to put the machine into the test mode,' [an anonymous] official said, adding that test mode can be enabled only in TSA test facilities. But the official declined to say whether activating test mode requires additional hardware, software or simply additional knowledge of how the machines operate."
PC World - Consumers want more retail stores to be more interactive and personalized online, a new survey from IBM has found. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 11 Jan 2010 | 5:10 pm
One of the world's most controversial paintings, "La Belle Ferronnière," will go on the Sotheby's auction block in New York on January 28. Many viewers are wondering: Is she or isn't she? A Leonardo, that is. Take a look and ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 11 Jan 2010 | 4:53 pm
AP - Video game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. cut its full-year guidance on Monday, as ongoing weakness in its game disc sales didn't ease up over the holidays as the company had hoped.
PC World - The Nexus is raising quite the ruckus. From the squabble over the device's name to complaints over poor 3G performance and subpar support, Google's first foray into phone sales is taking some unfortunate twists. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 11 Jan 2010 | 4:35 pm
Today, back in 1902 Henry Haven Windsor published the first issue of Popular Mechanics, helping to empower geeks of future generations with straightforward explanations of scientific and mechanical advances. "The magazine has reported both the brilliant and ridiculous ideas of its times, depending on the writer, scientist or editor. It once published an article about a Philadelphia physician who supposedly used X-rays to turn blacks into whites: probably not a great editorial decision. Betting on blimps over planes for so long might not have been advisable, and hyping excessive consumption during the birth of the environmental movement in the 1960s also rates a demerit. But beyond those probable transgressions, Popular Mechanics paved the way for the people’s incursion into science’s once-exclusive domain. Its longevity argues that science and its sometimes inscrutable possibility have raw mass appeal — even if the subject is cars with steering wheels in the back seat or self-diagnosing appliances."
But we also prepared and then partied. Here is video proof, including interviews with Cisco (CSCO) Flip unit head Jonathan Kaplan, BillShrink’s Peter Pham, Consumer Electronics Association head Gary Shapiro and–drum roll–former child star Soleil Moon Frye, who was there for Kodak (EK).
Frye has actually gone the digital mom route, although she remains well known for her role as cute-as-a-button Punky Brewster on the 1980s television series.
Yippie! Grossaroo! Holy Macanoli! Punky Power!
She uttered none of these classic lines, of course, but here’s the video anyway:
AP - Eastman Kodak Co. said Monday it will draw royalties from South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. under a licensing pact that gives the companies access to each other's digital-imaging patents. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 11 Jan 2010 | 4:07 pm
Macworld.com - Apple rolled out Apple Remote Desktop 3.3.2 on Monday, improving the overall stability and performance of the remote-management tools as well as fixing a number of specific issues. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 11 Jan 2010 | 4:03 pm
FROM APPLETELL - If there was one resounding theme present at CES 2010, it undoubtedly was 3D. love 3D, and I love that it’s coming to a living room near you. Here’s why… MORE »
Short Version: The Sprint Overdrive is a small, compact portable 3G/4G cellular data network to WiFi dongle designed for use by up to five people simultaneously. The best part is the ease of use and the worst part is the dearth of 4G networking outside of a few major cities.
Features:
Internal, replaceable battery
Front OLED screen
Sprint 4G support
Pros:
Very small
Screen displays security information
Good speed
Cons:
Only five users per device
4G coverage is sparse
Review:
We are of two minds about the Sprint Overdrive. In terms of design and usability, the Overdrive is excellent. It is a small, compact device with OLED screen and removable battery that holds a charge for about four hours of heavy use. Up to five users can access it at once and the security information appears right on the screen, allowing folks to glance over instead of asking you to give them the device to read the code off the back or, worse, having to look it up.
On the other hand, 4G is pretty sparse and on a good day we got sub 4G speeds in many of our tests in Vegas, although by any standard 4G there was sparse. At best we hit 2Mbps in real terms.
3G speeds were on par with what we’d expect in various Sprint coverage areas. A quick speed test gave us 355KBps down and 93KBps up. Various locations gave us the same numbers.
The device is $99 after $50 rebate and starts at $39 per month.
On the whole, this is a well-designed and clever product. Ideally you need to be in a 4G area to grab the full value but as those roll out over the next few months you might as well future proof now.
Bottom Line
Impressive design and good performance make this a dongle to watch.
PC World - Vizio's CES booth promoting its connected TVs was just the tip of the iceberg: In private showings it previewed a huge lineup of HDTVs and home-entertainment components sporting all the latest cutting-edge technologies. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 11 Jan 2010 | 3:56 pm
MikeChino writes "A company called Absorbent Materials has created a new kind of 'swelling glass' that can clean up contaminated groundwater by soaking up volatile molecules like a sponge. Dubbed 'Obsorb,' the material can hold up to 8 times its weight in fuel, oil, and solvents without sucking up any of the water itself. Once the material is full it floats to the surface and the pollutants can be skimmed off."
By Jennifer Valentino, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Two big questions remain about the recent spate of Facebook updates from women posting only their bra color as their status: Do the messages really raise awareness of breast cancer, as they’re reportedly intended? And who came up with this idea, anyway?
The Washington Post’s Know Your Meme, which follows Internet trends, says the messages began taking off on Thursday. The site offers several versions of the letters that started the trend, with the typical format going something like: “List the color of your bra in your FB status, just the color, nothing more. Then send this mssg to your girlfriends’ inboxes, too … no men. The point is to see how far we can spread breast cancer awareness … and make the men wonder what’s up :)” Some of the letters mention breast-cancer awareness, but some talk only about playing a joke on the men of Facebook.
An unknown hacker attacked Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s website last week. As a result the site was briefly redirecting to another domain that contained a plea to God from someone who appears to be a fan of Michael Jackson, Brittany Farrah Fawcett and several other celebrities who died in 2009:
“Dear God, In 2009 you took my favourite singer-Michael Jackson, my favourite actress-Farrah Fawcett, my favourite actor-Patrick Swayze, my favourite voice-Neda. Please, please, don’t forget my favourite politician-Ahmadinejad and my favourite dictator-Khamenei in the year 2010. Thank you.”
The attack came on the heels of one that hit Spain’s EU website. In that attack, hackers replaced photos of prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero with photos of British comic character Mr. Bean.
It’s not yet known who is responsible for either attack or if they are related. Ahmadinejad’s site has been offline since the breach.
We wanted to hate Pocket Heat, because it seems like such a terrible, foolish idea for an iPhone application. But we couldn’t, because a) the design and execution, right down to the lovely application icon, is absolutely dead-on and b) it doesn’t actually work any more
Pocket Heat turned the iPhone into a heater. You slid your finger and dial in the amount of heat you needed, and the app would industriously push the CPU and other processes in order to warm things up. If it worked on a regular computer, its fans would spin up and pump out hot air like a hair dryer.
The past-tense review is because the latest version of Pocket Heat doesn’t actually heat anything: it merely lights up the screen with a mellow, warm glow. According to the iTunes Store page, it “has no heating capabilities/battery drain” and instead features “warming graphics and sound effects”.
We imagine that consumer hatred caused this reversal, as draining the battery and overheating a computer is a rather stupid thing to do. But shouldn’t we be able to choose to be stupid? I guess that now the most stupid thing to do is to buy a $2 app that just shows pictures of a heater on screen. Hot? Sadly, not.
The Supreme Court blocks a civil trial testing California's ban on same-sex marriage from being uploaded to YouTube. The justices sided with same-sex marriage foes, who claimed they might be harassed or intimidated were their testimony to be aired.
Home theater is about compromise. You probably can’t afford tens of thousands of dollars to make a real home cinema. Neither can you convince your significant other that you need to jam a speaker into every corner of the room and, worse, run cables to them. And even if you’re happy with just a big TV hooked up to your PS3, the wall-mounted flat-panel is likely firing its rear-mounted speakers straight through the plaster into the (unimpressed) neighbor’s bedroom.
Thankfully, there is one compromise that looks like it will pay off in your favor, offering sleek good looks along with decent sound. The solution is a soundbar, a discreet strip of speakers that sits below the screen and, while not delivering the power or clarity of a full 5.1 setup, will certainly be good enough to make it worth watching T2 yet again.
We were expecting a slew of new soundbars at CES 2010, ready and eager to team up with all the big new HD TVs people have convinced themselves they needed for the analog switch-off. But we were disappointed, both with the quality and the quantity. The worst we saw were from Dell, paired up with its new Mini 10, the netbook with a hi-def screen and TV-tuner. A netbook is probably the computer in most need of a decent set of speakers, as the built-in ones are almost always tinny and terrible. Dell’s effort did nothing to improve the sound of the machine it was attached to.
The best (as in most convenient) models are those with built-in amplifiers, as they don’t need a separate receiver: instead they hook up to your TV’s outputs. Make sure, too, that there are enough inputs for all your sources, from DVD to games console to (gasp) VCR.
The most promising soundbar at CES was from Panasonic. The SC-HTB1 not only packs in all the speakers and electronics needed to trick you into thinking the sound is coming from behind you, it also has a pair of subwoofers inside, mounted pointing in opposite directions to reduce vibration. The unit hooks up via HDMI (for two-way audio) and has processing to make it sound as if the dialog is coming from the entire TV screen.
We’re skeptical on those subwoofers, though, as they are too tiny to shift the amount of air needed to punch the bass into your gut. Consider instead convincing your spouse that a sub-woofer is a worthwhile addition. Like the sub-and-satellite speakers most of us use to listen to music these days, adding a big, bad bass speaker to the mix will give explosions the kick that the little soundbars just can’t deliver. Better still, as bass is mono and mostly non-directional, you can always hide it behind the sofa, like a little kid watching Doctor Who.
January is National Stalking Awareness Month and 2010 marks the 15th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act. To commemorate both events, the Department of Justice held a panel discussion today on how serious stalking victimization is in the United ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 11 Jan 2010 | 3:03 pm
Researchers at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln have addressed the issue of faulty software by developing an algorithm and open source tool that is 300 times faster at generating tests and also reduces current software testing time.The new algorithm has potential to increase the efficiency of the software testing process across systems.The project, funded in part by an Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Award and through a National Science Foundation Early CAREER Award, is of particular interest to the military because of the potential to reduce errors in theater. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 11 Jan 2010 | 3:02 pm
FROM APPLETELL - Few iPhone cases provide the ability to attach your phone to your belt or what have you, but you can buy a separate belt clip to provide that functionality. Here are three solid choices. MORE »
A study published this week reinforces the potential value of stem cells in repairing major injuries involving the loss of bone structure.The study shows that delivering stem cells on a polymer scaffold to treat large areas of missing bone leads to improved bone formation and better mechanical properties compared to treatment with the scaffold alone. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 11 Jan 2010 | 2:32 pm
Pixel Qi’s low-power displays that can switch between color LCD screens and e-reader-like black-and-white displays was labeled vaporware in 2009.
But the company silenced its critics by offering some hands-on time at the Consumer Electronics Show with the screens that are already in production.
“We are going mainstream in 2010 in millions of units and we are leading with netbooks,” says Mary Lou Jepsen, founder of Pixel Qi.
Conventional LCD screens offer bright, glossy images but consume too much power. The images they display are also not visible in sunlight. It’s one of the reasons electronic paper, a low-power black-and-white display that can be seen clearly outdoors during the day, has become a rage among e-book readers. Pixel Qi promises to bridge both worlds.
Pixel Qi’s 3Qi display operates in three modes: a full-color LCD transmissive mode; a low-power, sunlight-readable, reflective e-paper mode; and a transflective mode, which makes the LCD display visible in sunlight.
The company is currently producing displays in the 10-inch screen size. They will debut on netbooks. Last year, research firm ABI expected 35 million netbooks to be shipped. That makes it easier to predict demand for these devices and produce displays in large volumes for them, Jepsen says. By the end of the year, Pixel Qi’s screens are expected to be in e-readers and tablets.
Here’s a closer look at the screen:
Transmissive mode:
Pixel Qi display’s transmissive mode is similar to how traditional LCD screens work.
An image on the display is composed of millions of individual pixels. Each pixel is divided into three sub-pixels: red, green and blue. Controlling the intensity of light available to each of these sub-pixels helps produce a color image.
Now, each of the subpixels are further divided into transmissive and reflective modes. In transmissive mode, the screen is primarily lit from the rear using a backlight. When the light reaches the LCD panel, it passes through polarizers that allow it to light up the required combination of subpixels.
The resultant reflected light is picked up by the eye. Pixel Qi’s full-color 10-inch screen has a resolution of 1024 by 600 pixels. It almost feels like a conventional LCD display though the colors aren’t as saturated and the image isn’t as vivid.
Still it is a remarkable sight especially when you know that with the press of a button that screen can be transformed into a black-and-white electronic paper display.
At its peak, the Pixel Qi’s display consumes far less power than conventional LCDs. Peak power is 2.5 watts. Turn off the backlight and you can shave 2 watts off, giving you an extremely low-power display.
Reflective mode:
With the press of a button (Fn + F2 key sequence during the demo), the screen switches to a black-and-white display that invokes the E Ink screen seen on the Kindle, Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble Nook.
In the reflective mode, the backlight is turned off and the ambient light hits a layer of mirror on the display that reflects it back completely. The result is a much higher resolution than in the LCD mode and a screen that plays just off the grayscale rather than creating colors.
In this mode, Pixel Qi’s display looks similar to the electronic paper displays. The key point here, the company says, is that in reflective mode though the screen looks and acts like a E Ink display, it still uses the LCD technology and is cleverly engineered it to mimic an E Ink-like feel.
But unlike an E Ink display, even in the reflective mode, Pixel Qi’s display burns power. E Ink displays don’t consume power while you are reading the text on the screen. It just draws power when you turn the page.
Pixel Qi’s display keeps refreshing at 60 Hz per second so it can’t offer the week-long battery life that an E Ink-based reader does. Pixel Qi says it’s working on displays with lower refresh rates (such as 30 Hz and less), but it isn’t there yet.
Transflective mode:
Play Slumdog Millionaire and stand in bright sunlight and you can still get a pretty good idea of what’s going on on the screen. Pixel Qi’s display scores over its rivals because of the transflective mode that allows viewers to use the LCD-like display even in bright sunlight.
Traditional LCD screens tend to go dark when turned on in direct sunshine. Pixel Qi solves the problem by adding a special layer to the display. The layer is a partial mirror since a part of it transmits the light and part of it reflects the light.
“It’s like a typical mirror layer found in most displays but with holes punched out in it,” says Jennifer Cosgrove, an analyst with research firm DisplaySearch. This allows for a composite mode where users can adjust the backlight and still see the LCD screen with reasonable brightness.
If the details about how the displays work are a little hazy, then it’s because Pixel Qi has been very tight-lipped about how it has re-engineered traditional LCD displays to create a screen that can operate in three modes. Pixel Qi has filed more than 20 patents around the technology.
The company is now working on creating touch overlays for its displays to turn them into touchscreens, Jepsen says.
Pixel Qi creates low-power displays that can switch between color LCD screens and e-reader-like black-and-white displays in an attempt to bring together the world of netbooks and e-readers.
Pixel Qi creates low-power displays that can switch between color LCD screens and e-reader-like black-and-white displays in an attempt to bring together the world of netbooks and e-readers.
AT&T’s iPhone users who attended this year’s CES in Las Vegas last week found much frustration when attempting to use their phones. There were widespread complaints about the poor service, with many users unable to make calls, send tweets, download emails or do much of anything that required data. Not surprisingly, Verizon didn’t hesitate to release a statement about how rock solid their service is:
What we have done and continue to do is have a buffer of capacity above what our demand is at any given point in time. When we see consumer demand begin to feed into that capacity, we scurry out there to add more capacity,” said Dick Lynch, Verizon Wireless’s chief technology officer, who was at CES displaying Verizon’s LTE network and devices. “This is a very simple concept and something we have done religiously over the year.”
AT&T has not responded to the criticism but it just adds to the black eye the company is getting in areas like San Francisco and New York City, where service is quite poor due to the strain being placed on the network by iPhone users. It’s clear AT&T is going to have to stop dragging its feet and sitting back on their laurels and make a strong and determined effort to fix their network in 2010 or they may find themselves slipping to back of the pack.
Drooling over the Android-powered Lenovo Lephone? Bask in it while it lasts, friends – as far as we know, these brand new press shots (and our fantastic hands-on with the device) are about as close as any of us outside of China are going to get with it any time soon.
If you’re not drooling yet, you might want to get those ol’ salivary glands checked. With a detachable keyboard and a downright gorgeous reskinning of Android, this is one handset we certainly wouldn’t mind seeing come stateside.
Some say that memories are priceless. This may be true, but memory has a price, and it’s a high one. Panasonic’s new anxiety-inducing, eggs-in-one-basket SDXC card packs 64GB into a sliver the size of a toenail. The price is an equally disturbing $600.
John Nack and John Peterson over at Adobe decided to see just how much this was, comparing the price of memory to the price of gold. As it turns out, Panasonic’s card is worth around 8 times its weight in gold:
A SD Card weighs about 2 grams. Gold is currently about $36/gram, so the 64GB cards cost eight times their weight in gold.
To actually make a standard-sized SD card from gold would cost around a grand:
The card has a volume of about 1.5 cc. Gold has a density of 19.32 g/cc, so a solid gold SD card would take almost 29g of gold, or about $1,000 worth.
Of course, SD cards devalue pretty fast, and 64GB will soon surely be available for a couple hundred dollars, whereas gold will still be “worth” around the same. If you really want to invest, though, may we suggest putting your money into printer ink, which runs at around $8,000-per-gallon.
No porn’s allowed in Apple’s App Store, but a clever developer has managed to flash some flesh through an image-viewing app.
Called forChan, the app specializes in viewing image boards on the web. The app comes preloaded with images of nude dogs, but with a few tweaks you can customize the app to view naked ladies.
Step 1: Download forChan
Step 2: Via your iPhone, visit iHustleApps.com/iPhone and press the “forChan” button
Step 3: Select one of the 15 “adults only” categories
Step 4: Copy the displayed URL to your clipboard
Step 5: Paste the URL in the Store URL section of forChan
And just like that — bow chicka bow wow — you’ve got porn! (We’ll spare you the screenshot since we trust you’ve been educated in human anatomy.) Though you could forego all these steps by simply launching Safari and loading a porn site.
Regardless, it’s not easy to sneak nude images into the App Store. Previous apps containing nudity, such as BeautyMeter and HottestGirls, quickly vanished after receiving press attention. When Steve Jobs introduced the App Store on June 9, 2008, porn was at the top of the list of content that would not be allowed in apps.
“There are going to be some apps that we’re not going to distribute,” Jobs said. “Porn, malicious apps, apps that invade your privacy.”
Now’s your time to place bets on how long Apple takes to ban forChan, if the company so decides. It’s a $1 app in the App Store.
Updated 2 p.m. PDT: forChan is no longer in the App Store. That was fast.
Microsoft's famously buggy Windows Genuine Advantage notification system sometimes won't stop nagging you, even though you're playing by the rules. Here's how to disable it.
Are men in the job market being hit harder in this recession than in previous economic downturns? On Friday, the Labor Department reported that 85,000 jobs were lost in the United States for the month of December 2009, an unexpectedly ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 11 Jan 2010 | 12:49 pm
Cannondale has pulled out the old-fashioned mechanical suspension inside its famous Lefty front-fork and stuffed in some electronics. The internal skunkworks project, called Simon, uses accelerometers and electromagnets to give a fast-responding, almost infinitely adjustable suspension.
Still a prototype, Simon essentially computerizes the ride of your bike. You can dial in various stiffnesses using a joystick and small computer up top on the handlebars — a softer ride for downhills and a rock-hard, stiff ride when on the smooth asphalt. This can, of course, be done with mechanical suspension, but introducing electronics makes things faster and smarter.
The electromagnets that control where and how much the fork can move act almost instantly, in around six milliseconds, and allow the fork to collapse from its maximum length right down to zero. These are informed by the accelerometers, and this is where the magic comes in. For instance, you could have the suspension dialed-up to act like a solid road fork. If you were to hit a bump in the road, though, the accelerometer would detect this before you even feel it and soften things up, allowing the bike to completely cushion the impact and return you to a good hard ride before you realize there was a pothole.
More, the response curves can be tuned to push back just how you like it, and you can switch configurations at the flick of a thumb. The Simon does add some weight, but as you are also tossing out a tube full of mechanical components the net gain is just a couple pounds (and this is a prototype, so that should improve). The other problem is battery life. Riding on the road you should be good for all day, but if you’re riding hard down a mountainside you could be out of juice in as little as two hours. Still, an extra battery pack could nestle next to the energy bar and the “emergency” hip-flask in your jersey pocket.
No pricing yet, nor even a launch date, but Cannondale seems pretty stoked about this tech, so we expect to see something soon. To see a somewhat in-depth and nerdy demo of the tech (the kind of demo we like), watch this video from bike blog Cycling Dirt:
FROM APPLETELL - It’s called the Fingerist, and no, I didn’t stroll to the wrong expo center. It’s essentially a speaker dock…in the shape of a keytar! MORE »
Image Caption: Purple Herons frequent the peatlands of Las Tablas de Daimiel National Park. Courtesy J.M.Garg - Wikipedia Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 11 Jan 2010 | 12:16 pm
Launched by the United Nations, the International Year of Biodiversity comes with a warning that the continuing loss of species around the world is disturbing the well-being of humankind, according to BBC News. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 11 Jan 2010 | 12:05 pm
Accelerometers have been inside cameras for a long time now. They’re the little gizmos that tell the camera which way up it was when you took a shot and allow auto-rotation of images. They also help keep the images stabilized, and in some cases they even help with exposure, so that the camera knows which way is up and can guess that the big blue strip at the top is probably the sky.
Casio is squeezing a little more from the accelerometer a new prototype, a modified Exilim EX-H10, with something called “hybrid GPS”. The camera has a GPS unit inside, which will geo-tag your images as you shoot. The clever twist is that when the camera can’t see the GPS satellites (ie. nearly always), the camera actually uses the accelerometers to track your movements in space and location-stamp the images based on this guesstimate.
It also appears that you might even navigate with the camera, as it has built-in maps that can be displayed on screen. These can show you where you are, and also plot “push-pins” to mark where your photos have been taken.
GPS is still quite rare in cameras, and the problem of indoor tracking is likely to be a big reason for this. The other problem has been battery drain, and Casio’s system could, theoretically, fix this too by only firing up the GPS radio to check its calculations from time to time.
Like we said, this is a prototype, but Casio has a habit of quickly bringing its innovations to market. I’m looking forward to the next logical step: Just throw in an electronic compass like you get in modern smart-phones and the camera will know which way it is pointing, too. That should let it make automatic panoramas and fly-through virtual reconstructions of your vacation, similar to Microsoft’s wonderful Photosynth.
A growing number of scientists are merging methods and results from different disciplines to extract new meaning from old data, says a team of researchers in a recent issue of Evolution.As science becomes increasingly specialized and focused on new data, however, researchers who want to analyze previous findings may have a hard time getting funding and institutional support, the authors say. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 11 Jan 2010 | 11:45 am
A Tanzanian program to supply insecticide treated nets to prevent malaria in pregnant women successfully delivers the intervention to only 30% of women, but simple changes could increase effectiveness, according to an article http://www.cmaj.ca/embargo/cmaj090268.pdf in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) www.cmaj.ca.Insecticide treated nets have been shown to reduce childhood mortality by 17% in different areas in Africa, reduce infection with malaria parasites in pregnant women by 38%, and decrease the incidence of severe malarial anemia by 47%.The study by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London, England and the Ifakara Health Institute, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania looked at a sample of 6198 households that participated in the Tanzanian National Voucher Scheme between 2005 and 2007.The program targets pregnant women and infants by providing vouchers for nets to women at their first antenatal visit. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 11 Jan 2010 | 11:42 am
Image 1: Terry Tickhill (light hat) and Eileen McSaveney (red headband) use a hand augur to drill Lake Vanda, Wright Valley, Antarctica, during the 1969-1970 field season. Water collected during this effort was used to date the lake. The green tent in the background was of the same type as the field crew used for housing during their work in Wright Valley. Credit: Lois JonesImage 2: Bonnie hut beside Lake Bonnie, Taylor Valley, Antarctica, as it appeared in 1969. Dr. Lois Jones' crew called the hut home for several weeks while sampling the area. Credit: Terry Tickhill Terrell Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 11 Jan 2010 | 11:41 am
There are few buzzkills as harsh as tearing open a much-anticipated new gadget only to find something glaringly wrong with it. It doesn’t happen all that often anymore, with the big players all having some pretty rigorous Q&A practices in place. Unfortunately, all the reassurances in the world that something “shouldn’t happen” doesn’t help cool the burn when it actually does.
A good number of new Nexus One owners are feeling that burn this week. They sifted through the hype for weeks, took the plunge, and.. something’s wrong. According to this post over on the T-Mo support forums, Nexus Ones around the country are bouncing back and forth between 3G and EDGE like some sort of depressing tennis match (or not connecting to 3G at all) in places where the 3G signal is usually bountiful.
It took a few days, but Google and T-Mobile are on the case. According to an itty-bitty blurp statement straight from T-Mo’s mouth:
Google and T-Mobile are investigating this issue and hope to have more information for you soon. We understand your concern and appreciate your patience.
Good luck, guys – lets just hope this isn’t something that will require a hardware replacement. Those tend to get pricey.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
While genetics play a key role in children’s initial reading skills, a new study of twins is the first to demonstrate that environment plays an important role in reading growth over time.The results give further evidence that children can make gains in reading during their early school Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 11 Jan 2010 | 11:31 am
What’s better than shooting HD video with a tiny compact camera? Shooting video underwater with a tiny compact camera, of course. Olympus has announced, amongst an otherwise rather dull CES lineup, the Stylus Tough 3000.
The 3000 is shockproof, waterproof and freeze-proof, and packs a 12 megapixel sensor which can also shoot 720p video. You can drop it to the ground from five feet up, dunk it into 10 feet of water and use it in temperatures as low as 14ºF (that’s below zero, or minus 10ºC, for our worldwide readers).
But there are a few extras that make this a little different from other ruggedized cameras. The Tough 3000 has an accelerometer inside, so that you can change settings even while wearing thick gloves. Instead of fumbling for a tiny button, you tap the sides of the camera. It senses the directions of these little bumps and changes the settings. This alone sets the little Olympus apart from other sport-cams.
The Tough 3000 has everything else you’d expect from a modern compact — image stabilization, face detection (we’re not sure if it works on sharks or other undersea dangers — do sharks even have proper faces?) and a neat panorama function where you hit the shutter release once and then pan the camera across the scene in front. The camera trips the shutter three times in all at just the right spot (using those accelerometers we guess) and the whole shebang is stitched together into one wide picture.
The tough-cam will be on sale in February for $230.
FROM GAMERTELL - Gamertell goes hands on with EyePet at CES 2010. Features include washing your pet and creating a plane for him to explore the skies. MORE »
The recent Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas made a splash with 3-D TV. Oh to have seen it. But, probably much like you, I was bundled up for winter instead. Here's green tech from the show that will haunt my ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 11 Jan 2010 | 11:20 am
Acer has announced a recall of over 22,000 laptops due to a major overheating problem. The computers have a defect in the microphone wire beneath the palm rest, which can lead to short circuiting and overheating. In some cases the overheating was severe enough to cause the external casing to show signs of melting.
The affected models are the Acer AS3410, AS3410T, AS3810T, AS3810TG, AS3810TZ and AS3810TZG. They were sold between June and October of last year. If you have one of the above models you can call 1-800-571-2237 for more information or go here and type in your unit’s serial number. Acer claims they are also sending out emails to affected customers.
European customers were notified back in October but the company has now decided to expand the recall to the U.S. as well.
These are the remains of the earliest building ever found in Tel Aviv, according to Israel's Antiquities Authority. Located on the northern bank of the Yarkon River, the building consists of at least three rooms and it is believed to ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 11 Jan 2010 | 11:02 am
You know, the grass really is greener on the other side. Take the HTC Hero, for example; Russia’s got it, and so do we – albeit with a slightly less awesome body. No discrepancies there, though – we’ve both got the same basic phone, so we can all be happy. But now Russia has an HTC Hero made of chocolate.
Over the past week, a few members of the Russian press have been surprised with these sweet treats. Why is HTC sending out chocolate Heros? No one’s really sure. Could they could be launching the device on a new carrier? Might they just be trying to make me jealous of my Russian colleagues? At the very least, it’s a damned good way to make LG feel silly for not doing this with every model of the LG Chocolate ever.
FROM APPLETELL - I stopped by the New Kinetix booth today at CES 2010 to check out the Re Remote. They gave me a full product demo. Check it out. MORE »
Perhaps caught off guard, an executive of international carrier Orange said in a French TV interview that an Apple tablet will debut soon.
In the video above, Stéphane Richard, who is set to be Orange’s CEO, responds “Yes” when French media asks whether the rumors are true that an Apple tablet will debut soon. The interviewer then asks Richard whether the tablet will be available for Orange customers, to which the executive replies, “Of course.”
Richard’s statement could have been a slip, but it’s also likely that he’s aware the news about the tablet has already leaked — perhaps at Apple’s request. Last week, John Martellaro, a former senior marketing manager at Apple, confessed that Apple sometimes intentionally leaks secrets to WSJ. The purpose? To gauge reaction of the market to certain details such as price, or to panic a competitor, among other sneaky reasons. Very interesting, and a controlled leak to WSJ seems to be what’s happened with the rumored Apple tablet.
Update 3:30 p.m. PDT: Orange’s PR claims Richard’s statements do not “confirm” an Apple tablet and that he was merely saying “Yes” to acknowledge speculation surrounding the tablet. Still, that doesn’t explain why he said “Of course” when asked whether the tablet would be available for Orange customers (such a guarantee could not be independently made by Richard, as it would rely on Apple’s agreement to share the tablet with Orange). Also, it’s worth noting Orange previously acknowledged the existence of the iPhone prior to its launch.
What happened to your iPhone? It broke?! How?!! Just stopped working?! Really?! You didn’t drop it in the toilet? You dropped it in the toilet, didn’t you? Ah, the truth comes out. You dropped it in the toilet.
In 2004 everyone freaked out when Gmail launched because Google would be reading your emails to figure out what ads to serve you. “Privacy advocates objected to the advertising model, which involves Google’s robot eyes scanning every e-mail for keywords and displaying contextual advertisements alongside a user’s inbox,” noted 
The Italian publisher Apogeo commissioned a professional Italian translation of my Creative Commons-licensed essay collection 
Last Friday, the location-based service 
If you’ve looked at buying a television the past several years, chances are you’re well aware of the terms: Plasma, DLP, LCD, and more recently, OLED. Well, there’s a new acronym in town: LPD.
With Android and 
In other words, rock 'n' roll is cheap, experimental and fluid, and devotes most of its energy into the production of music. Orchestral music is expensive, formal and majestic, but tithes a large portion of its effort to coordination and overheads and maintenance.
Hundreds of Tintin fans have already backed Mr Garcia, who on Thursday called for a boycott of the film and claimed that many supporters were heeding his demand. More than 500 people have joined his page on the Facebook website which expresses "anger and disgust" over the issue. More supporters have also backed his cause on other websites.
Time to save the date! Word is out that the sequel to the JJ Abrams Star Trek movie will be out on July 29th, 2012. What we don’t know as of yet is exactly who the director will be.
Earlier today, The Rumpus 
Every day I troll SEC Form D Filings to discover new startups, fundings and investments. I put everything I find into 
Do not expect 
One of the key features of the 
An unknown hacker attacked Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s website last week. As a result the site was briefly redirecting to another domain that contained a plea to God from someone who appears to be a fan of Michael Jackson, Brittany Farrah Fawcett and several other celebrities who died in 2009:
AT&T’s iPhone users who attended this year’s CES in Las Vegas last week found much frustration when attempting to use their phones. There were widespread complaints about the poor service, with many users unable to make calls, send tweets, download emails or do much of anything that required data. Not surprisingly, Verizon didn’t hesitate to release a statement about how rock solid their service is:
![Screen shot 2010-01-11 at [ January 11 ] 10.05.44 AM](http://www.mobilecrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Screen-shot-2010-01-11-at-January-11-10.05.44-AM.png "Screen shot 2010-01-11 at [ January 11 ] 10.05.44 AM")
Acer has announced a recall of over 22,000 laptops due to a major overheating problem. The computers have a defect in the microphone wire beneath the palm rest, which can lead to short circuiting and overheating. In some cases the overheating was severe enough to cause the external casing to show signs of melting.
What happened to your iPhone? It broke?! How?!! Just stopped working?! Really?! You didn’t drop it in the toilet? You dropped it in the toilet, didn’t you? Ah, the truth comes out. You dropped it in the toilet.
