|
|
|
|
YouTube To Allow Video Rentalspoopdeville writes "Starting Friday, Google and YouTube will allow movie rentals. The first five films available to rent through YouTube will cost $3.99 for a 48-hour viewing period. Movie studios will be able to set their own prices, with rental viewing windows ranging from one to 90 days. YouTube will get an unspecified commission from each rental. Barclays Capital analyst Douglas Anmuch expects YouTube to generate about $700 million in revenue this year, an estimated 55 percent increase from 2009. If YouTube hits that target, it likely will turn profitable, helping to justify the $1.76 billion in stock that Google paid for the site more than three years ago."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 21 Jan 2010 | 3:28 am Tablet Wars: Amazon Adds Apps to Kindle - Wired News
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 21 Jan 2010 | 3:26 am Tablet Wars: Amazon Adds Apps to Kindle
What kind of apps could run in the low-fi Kindle? Well, you won’t be getting Monkey Ball, but interactive books, travel guides with locations data, RSS readers and anything that brings text to the device would be a good candidate. This could even include magazine and newspaper subscriptions. The key is the revenue split. Right now Amazon takes a big chunk of the selling price of Kindle e-books. The terms of the new Kindle Development Kit (KDK) specify a 70:30 split, with the large part going to the developer. This is the same as the iTunes App Store, which is surely no coincidence — with an expected e-reading Apple tablet announcement next week, Amazon may be showing its hand now to pre-empt Apple. It might appear that Amazon is going head-to-head with Apple on this, but we see it a little differently. Apple sells hardware, and while the App Store brings in a nice chunk of change, it is there primarily to sell more iPhones and iPods. Amazon sells books, and the Kindle is a way to make sure you buy Amazon’s e-books. That’s why there is a Kindle app for the iPhone, and why there will be a Kindle app on the tablet: it benefits both companies. “Active content” will certainly make the Kindle more compelling, especially against other e-readers, although it will also make the Kindle more distracting. One of the nice things about an e-reader is that you can’t use it to check your email every five minutes. Or perhaps you can. The KDK allows the use of the wireless 3G connection. If the application uses less than 100KB per month, the bandwidth comes for free. If it uses more, there is a charge of $0.15 per MB which can (and surely will) be passed on to the customer as a monthly charge. This model could, interestingly, also make its way into Apple’s tablet. Instead of trying to sell us yet another data plan, the tablet could have a Kindle-style free 3G connection used only for buying iTunes Store content, with the bandwidth price built in to the purchase. That is just speculation, however. What we are sure of is that the next year will be an interesting one, and the e-book is set to take off in the same way that the MP3 took off before it. The question is, who will be making the iPod of e-books? Given its relatively low price, its appeal to an older, book buying demographic and its ascetic simplicity, the surprise winner might actually be the Kindle. KDK Limited Beta Coming Next Month [Amazon] 
You'll need a Nokia phone with Ovi Maps (which runs on Navteq's digital mapping, who Nokia bought out in 2008), for getting free drive and walk navigation; maps updates; and events, Lonely Planet and Michelin guides. Currently it's only available on the X6, N97 Mini, E72, E55, E52, 6730 Classic, 6710 Navigator, 5800 XpressMusic, 5800 Navigation Edition and the 5230. If you've got one of those phones, hit up Nokia over here and download it now. Let us know how you get on with it—supposedly it works offline? [Nokia Maps via Nokia Conversations]  Source: Gizmodo | 21 Jan 2010 | 3:16 am China: Google case not linked to ties with US
|
 Reuters | Nokia takes on Google with free navigation app CNET Nokia is making its navigation service free to all GPS-enabled Nokia devices in a move that will help the company better compete in the smartphone market against the likes of Apple and Google. Starting Thursday, Nokia users will ... Nokia to offer free navigation Nokia Delivers Free Navigation Service to Customers Nokia frees turn-by-turn maps |
By Om Malik, Founder and Senior Writer, GigaOm
Apple (AAPL) and AT&T (T) have come under continued criticism for not allowing VoIP over today’s 3G mobile broadband connections when using the iPhone. So much so that the matter got the attention of the FCC back in August, leading to explanations from Apple and Ma Bell.
A few weeks ago, we had wondered why there were still no VoIP-over-3G connections.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
By Felix Salmon, Blogger, Reuters.com
Preston Austin has managed to squeeze the economics of a NYT-style paywall into one tweet, but it’s compressed, so let me expand it into slightly more than 140 characters.
The way that it seems the NYT (NYT) paywall is going to work, visitors to nytimes.com will have a free allowance of n articles per month. To read the n+1th article, they will have to pay a subscription fee F. After that, they can read as many articles as they like for the rest of the month.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Reuters - Nokia will follow Google, offering free maps on its cellphones, in a move to boost handset sales but one that will hit other satnav players, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Thursday, citing the Finnish company.
By Jonathan Matsey, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
While Christmas Day’s close brush with an alleged plot to blow up an airplane kept the nation on edge, one venture-backed company played a role in nabbing the suspect.
“The haz-mat officials were using an Ahura device on that airplane in Detroit,” said Nina Saberi, managing general partner at Castile Ventures, an early investor in Ahura Scientific Inc., which sells a line of handheld devices to identify chemical substances from common household items to deadly industrial toxins.
Ahura’s presence in the first responder, military and pharmaceutical markets – bolstered by about $45 million in revenue in 2009 – helped drive interest from several industry players, culminating in an acquisition agreement from Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. for $145 million cash up-front and a further earn-out based on 2010 sales.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
The U.K. government has decided to make the non-personal data it holds available for web developers to create a new wave of public applications. It’s a bold move which will open up more data than even the U.S. government holds at its Data.gov. The new Data.gov.uk site is officially launched today by Web creator Sir Tim Berners Lee and been has been running for the last six months in beta with almost 3,000 data sets available. By contrast, the U.S. site Data.gov, has less than 1,000 data sets. So far over 2,400 developers have registered to test the site and 10 applications built. These include PlanningAlerts, a free service that emails you if someone has put in a planning application to build near your house and FillThatHole, which lets people report potholes and other road hazards across the UK.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
There are so many music search engines out there based on YouTube music videos (Songza comes to mind) that it was only a matter of time until YouTube created its own music playlist maker. The YouTube Music Discovery Project just launched quietly out of TestTube (YouTube’s labs). The page is a search box on top of which says, “Find>Mix>Watch,” and once you enter a name, you hit the “Disco” button to find music.
You can enter any music group or artist, and a playlist pops up, along with a thumbnail video and a description of the band. You can find related artists, create a mixtape, and save playlists. As you are listening to music and watching videos, it is easy to add and delete songs.
YouTube is taking advantage of a lot of the officially-sanctioned Vevo music videos in the Music Discovery Project. Playlists are saved to your regular YouTube playlists page, from where you can share them via email. For instance, here is a playlist I crated called “Too Cool For School.” Oddly, there doesn’t seem to be any to purchase the music other than the occasional iTunes ad within the videos themselves. But this is an experimental product
(Hat Tip to Ron Ilan).
On the Vintage Ads LJ, one of history's great Sugar Smacks boxes.
Adeo Ressi’s Founder Institute is going international. This Spring, the startup mentorship program will be expanding to Singapore, Paris, Los Angeles, and Denver, meaning that the Founder Institute is now active in nine cities worldwide. Interested entrepreneurs can apply starting tonight, with an early application deadline of February 15 2010 and a final deadline of February 28. These four new programs will start simultaneously this spring.
Ressi, who founded the program, says that the Founder Institute is the first incubator program to expand beyond the United States (though there are other entrepreneur-focused programs like Seedcamp). As the Institute grows, it comes closer to Ressi’s goal of training 1000 founders a year. Conservatively, he think that this year the nine programs in aggregate will graduate over 700 founders and 500 companies, though he wouldn’t be surprised if the tally is more like 750 companies.
The Founder Institute was announced back in March 2009, offering entrepreneurs and very early stage startups an environment designed to help foster their growth and education. The program holds two four-month long sessions annually at each location, which include mentorship sessions from experienced tech entrepreneurs. The program also has a unique structure that allocates some equity to each of the founders involved, so that they have an incentive to work together (and there’s a better chance that they’ll see some financial gain out of the deal even if their startup doesn’t take off).
Here are some of the mentors Ressi confirmed for the spring semester. Ressi notes that about half of the mentors in Paris and Singapore will be visiting from Silicon Valley:
Nolan Bushnell, Founder of Atari, Chuck E. Cheese, and uWink;
Aaron Patzer, Founder and CEO of Mint.com;
Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote;
Philip Kaplan, Co-Founder of Blippy, Founder of Adbrite and F’d Company;
Ross Levinsohn, Founder of Fuse Capital and former President of Fox Interactive;
Bryan Thatcher, CEO of LockerBlogger, Empressr, and Fusebox;
and Mathieu Nouzareth, Founder of Cafe.com and serial web entrepreneur.
In fact, I just signed up. I'll let you know how it works out.
Ipredator is currently using the same platform as several other VPN franchises including Relakks, which means it's not really anything we haven't seen before. The servers are maintained and provided by Pirate Bay affiliates though, which may be more trustworthy to the average BitTorrent user than a random VPN provider.That aside, we were told by former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde that contrary to what the legal page states, no logs of any kind are kept by Ipredator. The text that is in there is a left over from the standard template they got from the provider of the VPN platform.
And, according to Sunde, there will soon be even more advantages and added security to Ipredator.
Pirate Bay's Ipredator VPN Opens To The Public (TorrentFreak)
(via Memex 1.1)
We don't know the big details of the release, namely date and price, but it has been officially confirmed by Square Enix on their Twitter and Facebook. The iPhone just got a whole lot more respectable on the gaming front. [RedmondPie via Kotaku]
If you are going to try to steal Apple’s thunder just before its big Tablet announcement, you are going to have to do a little bit better than E-Ink Sudoku. Amazon is obviously concerned that the upcoming Apple Tablet, which will be able to function as a lush, full-color electronic reader for newspapers, books, and magazines might overshadow the black-and-white Kindle with its dot-matrix feel. So what does it do? It matches Apple’s rev-share with app developers by raising the royalty it gives publishers to 70 percent, starts to practically give away Kindles, and opens up the Kindle to developers.
That’s right, there is now a Kindle Development Kit and there will soon be Kindle Apps. So instead of just books, you will be able to play Sudoku and scroll through interactive Zagat guides. Maybe you’ll be able to play Space Invaders or Pong, if the E-Ink technology the screen is based on can ever refresh fast enough for you to shoot the aliens.
The Kindle will support free apps, one-time purchases, and subscriptions. Kidding aside, I can see some useful, text-based apps that could use some interactivity, but what you’d end up with is a Kindle version of a Website. (The Kindle already does come with a primitive browser which could be improved upon). At least the keyboard might now actually serve a purpose.
But if Amazon really wants to open up the Kindle, what it should do is allow other hardware and software developers to create their own electronic readers that work with the Kindle store. Presumably the existing Kindle for the IPhone app will work on the Tablet as well.
Given the choice between developing beautiful, touchscreen, GPS-enabled, gyroscopic apps for an Apple Tablet and dorky E-Ink apps for the Kindle, developers are going to go with the Tablet first, is my bet. But maybe I’m wrong.
What Kindle apps are you dying for?
There, I Fixed It says the quotation marks are "highly appropriate."
Source: Boing Boing | 20 Jan 2010 | 11:06 pm
Jules Verne sketches part 1 (via Super Punch)
 CNET | Report: Apple tablet is a shared media device CNET As the date of the Apple event next week approaches, more details about the device are leaking out. The cryptic Apple invitation for the January 27 event. On Wednesday night, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple's newest gadget ... Report: Apple Looks to Repackage Content for Tablet Apple tablet signed up by EA Apple sees tablet as one device shared by the whole family - WSJ |
Open Letter From OK Go, regarding non-embeddable YouTube videosThe catch: the software that pays out those tiny sums doesn't pay if a video is embedded. This means our label doesn't get their hard-won share of the pie if our video is played on your blog, so (surprise, surprise) they won't let us be on your blog. And, voilá: four years after we posted our first homemade videos to YouTube and they spread across the globe faster than swine flu, making our bassist's glasses recognizable to 70-year-olds in Wichita and 5-year-olds in Seoul and eventually turning a tidy little profit for EMI, we're - unbelievably - stuck in the position of arguing with our own label about the merits of having our videos be easily shared. It's like the world has gone backwards.
Let's take a wider view for a second. What we're really talking about here is the shift in the way we think about music. We're stuck between two worlds: the world of ten years ago, where music was privately owned in discreet little chunks (CDs), and a new one that seems to be emerging, where music is universally publicly accessible. The thing is, only one of these worlds has a (somewhat) stable system in place for funding music and all of its associated nuts-and-bolts logistics, and, even if it were possible, none of us would willingly return to that world. Aside from the smug assholes who ran labels, who'd want a system where a handful of corporate overlords shove crap down our throats? All the same, if music is going to be more than a hobby, someone, literally, has to pay the piper. So we've got this ridiculous situation where the machinery of the old system is frantically trying to contort and reshape and rewire itself to run without actually selling music. It's like a car trying to figure out how to run without gas, or a fish trying to learn to breath air.
This sick and twisted habit of scaring mailmen will set me back about $55, which is a bargain in my book. [Amazon via Oh Gizmo! via Akihabarana via Nerd Approved]
AP - EBay Inc. said Wednesday its fourth-quarter earnings rose as its PayPal payments business grew and holiday shoppers gravitated to its online auctions and "Buy It Now" offerings. The company also logged a large gain from the November sale of its Skype telecommunications business.
Says Amazon's vice president for Kindle:
We knew from the earliest days of the Kindle that invention was not all going to take place within the walls of Amazon. We wanted to open this up to a wide range of creative people, from developers to publishers to authors, to build whatever they like.
In that spirit, they've opened up development to selected partners (not everyone, yet—a wider release will come later this month) to create apps for the Kindle platform. There'll be three kinds of apps: Free, one-time payment, and monthly payment. Interestingly, because the Kindle is sold without a monthly fee for the wireless connection, these developers will have to pay 15 cents per megabyte for content delivery. They'll keep 70% of the revenue after those expenses are recouped by Amazon—more info on that stuff here.
There are also some basic limits on both bandwidth and app size. Free apps must be smaller than 1MB and use less than 100KB of data per user per month. One-time purchase apps and monthly apps both have the same data usage limit as free apps, but have a size limit of 100MB (although any app larger than 10MB can't be downloaded wirelessly—gotta do it via USB).
Amazon expects to start adding apps "sometime later this year," which is a nice vague thing to say in January. They'll also retain control over the types of apps added, restricting offensive apps, VoIP apps, viruses, that kind of thing. Now: What kind of things are we likely to see in a Kindle app store?
The Kindle is extremely limited by its hardware, most importantly its e-ink screen. The kind of glacial refreshes that are acceptable while reading a book make it totally useless for pretty much any game. The only ones that can deal with the limited screen are essentially pen-and-paper games, like Sudoku, word games (crossword puzzles, Scrabble) and, um, hangman. Scrabble is a fair bet to make an early appearance, since it's owned by EA, one of the two partners specifically named in the NYTimes announcement.
Other apps mentioned include searchable travel books, like a Zagat app that could find, say, local restaurants with specific criteria. But apps like that are really better suited for smartphones, which is an argument you could make about the entire idea of a Kindle app store. We'll have to wait until the plan actually launches before we see if it was a good decision—and who knows, by then the Apple Tablet will probably have revolutionized the publishing industry, solved the economic recession and rescued the world's kittens from the world's trees. [Amazon and NYTimes 1 and 2]
Amazon Announces Kindle Development Kit—Software Developers Can Now Build Active Content for Kindle
Travel books that suggest activities based on real-time weather and current events, cookbooks that recommend menus based on size of party and allergies, and word games and puzzles—just some of the possibilities with the new Kindle Development KitSEATTLE, Jan 21, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — (NASDAQ: AMZN)—For the past two years, Amazon has welcomed authors and publishers to directly upload and sell content in the Kindle Store through the self-service Kindle publishing platform. Today, Amazon announced that it is inviting software developers to build and upload active content that will be available in the Kindle Store later this year. The new Kindle Development Kit gives developers access to programming interfaces, tools and documentation to build active content for Kindle—the #1 bestselling, most wished for, and most gifted product across all categories on Amazon. Developers can learn more about the Kindle Development Kit today at http://www.amazon.com/kdk/ and sign up to be notified when the limited beta starts next month.
"We've heard from lots of developers over the past two years who are excited to build on top of Kindle," said Ian Freed, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. "The Kindle Development Kit opens many possibilities—we look forward to being surprised by what developers invent."
The Kindle Development Kit enables developers to build active content that leverages Kindle's unique combination of seamless and invisible 3G wireless delivery over Amazon Whispernet, high-resolution electronic paper display that looks and reads like real paper, and long battery life of seven days with wireless activated. For example, Handmark is building an active Zagat guide featuring their trusted ratings, reviews and more for restaurants in cities around the world, and Sonic Boom is building word games and puzzles.
"As the leading worldwide publisher of mobile games, EA Mobile has had the privilege of collaborating with many dynamic and innovative companies in bringing exciting gaming experiences to new platforms," says Adam Sussman, Vice President of Worldwide Publishing, EA Mobile. "Working with Amazon, we look forward to bringing some of the world's most popular and fun games to Kindle and their users."
Starting next month, participants in the limited beta will be able to download the Kindle Development Kit, access developer support, test content on Kindle, and submit finished content. Those wait-listed will be invited to participate as space becomes available. The Kindle Development Kit includes sample code, documentation, and the Kindle Simulator, which helps developers build and test their content by simulating the 6-inch Kindle and 9.7-inch Kindle DX on Mac, PC, and Linux desktops.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hesitant about ordering an Amazon Kindle? The online retailer is apparently making a very tempting proposition to some of its customers: go ahead and order a Kindle, and if you don’t like it, you’ll get your money back — and get to keep the device. In other words, if you’re not satisfied you’ll get a free Kindle (and an Amazon-branded cover). Talk about putting your money where your mouth is.
The screenshots we’ve received look legitimate, but we haven’t been able to find any mention of this offer on Twitter or elsewhere (this seems like the sort of thing people would be going nuts over). We’ve contacted Amazon for confirmation. If you see it yourself, let us know in the comments. Update: Amazon has confirmed that it’s real. To give an idea of the kind of user who has gotten the offer:
Commenter Vladimir Cole has listed how many books he typically orders from Amazon (it sounds like he averages more than a book a week).
Commenter Alex L says that he sees it too. He’s only ordered a total of around 20 books in the last three years (most of which were last year).
Our original tipster says that he orders perhaps a couple of books per month and has been a member since 1997.
Assuming it is real, it’s pretty clear that this is only being offered on a limited scale right now — the promotion points out that the user who saw it is an “unusually active book customer” and the deal is non-transferable. It’s also obviously designed to entice these users to make impulse buys, as the promotion ends in only five days. Also worth pointing out: the promotion ends just over a day before Apple’s upcoming event. Perhaps Amazon is looking to grab any book-loving holdouts before the Tablet lands?
To those who can get the offer, it looks like you’ll have 30 days to make up your mind. Amazon isn’t making it excessively easy to make your money back — you’ll have to actually Email or call their support staff. Assuming the promotion is real, I suspect it will work out in Amazon’s favor. They’ve almost certainly done market research showing that bibliophiles love the device, and how likely these users are to request a refund.
Thanks to Arthur Wait for the tip
Dan Woolley was caught under a pile of rubble when the earthquake hit, injuring both his leg and his head. A first-aid app instructed him on the best way to create a tourniquet for his leg and a bandage for his head, and even warned him against falling asleep after head trauma—so he set his iPhone's alarm clock to go off every 20 minutes as a precaution.
Evidently the strategies worked, because he survived long enough to be rescued 65 hours later and reunited with his family. I can't figure out exactly which app he used, which is mildly inconvenient since now I'll have to download every first-aid app I can find. [MSNBC via Wired]
Comcast is in discussions with partners to offer a music streaming service to its customers as an à la carte offering, we’ve heard from multiple sources. For an additional monthly charge of $5 or more, users will be able to stream on demand music online via a website and on their TV via their cable box.
For the last 18 months a Danish ISP called TDC has been offering customers in that country the ability to stream music online as part of their basic ISP packages ranging from $47 to $65 per month. From what we’ve heard from our friends in Denmark, the service is very popular.
The Comcast service would offer users the ability to stream music without any additional charges. Services like MySpace Music, Spotify and MOG (and the late iMeem) offer similar services today, but not through the cable box.
In the past we’ve said that the music industry’s last stand will be a music tax, and they’ll aim for the ISP’s when they finally try to convince governments to do it. Comcast’s planned service isn’t a music tax, and presumably it will be an optional add on to normal Comcast ISP and cable TV services. Still, I can see a time in the not too distant future that we’re all paying $5/month for music via our ISPs. Whether we choose to or not.
Do you have a credit card? A bobbin of fishing line? A bolt? A drill? Tape? Then do yourself a favor and make yourself a credit card grappling hook. What else are you doing at midnight on a Wednesday?
The full instructions are right here but it should be fairly obvious from the picture how to do it.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Buried all the way at the bottom of the Wall Street Journal’s latest piece about the Apple Tablet is a very interesting nugget of information. Apple is apparently gearing up to launch a cloud-based iTunes replacement called iTunes.com as soon as this June, WSJ states citing sources familiar with the matter.
Yesterday, we ran a guest post by Michael Robertson, the former CEO of MP3.com, who laid out Apple’s cloud-based media strategy going forward. An iTunes-in-the-cloud offering is the central part of this, and could happen “almost over night,” as Robertson laid out. And late last year we wrote about how a move to the cloud was inevitable for iTunes. The planets seem to be aligning for this to happen sooner rather than later. Apple’s recent purchase of the music startup Lala has potentially made this possible, because of that team’s talent, if nothing else. But there’s more.
Apparently, part of Apple’s strategy in moving iTunes online would be to make it so that third-party sites could easily implement one-click purchases of iTunes content, presumably through some iTunes APIs. Yes, plenty of sites offer iTunes click-to-buy buttons now, but they require that you load up the iTunes software and enter the iTunes Store through there to make the purchase — it’s cumbersome, to say the least.
A fully web-based iTunes could have huge business potential for Apple which has traditionally counted on the service as just a small source of overall revenue (aside from the newer App Store element), and used it as more of a way to move iPods with their higher margins. Such a move would potentially turn services like Pandora into mini-iTunes stores.
[photo: flickr/vsz]
Chances are you already have some furniture made of wood pulp and sawdust in your home — all that Ikea stuff? Yeah. But this is a little different. Some brave furniteers (?) decided that the texture of raw wood bits and resin was too attractive to leave in the workshop, so they put together a few casts and made a coffee table and some stools with it. I think it turned out quite nicely, and as they note at Make, the way the legs are attached organically to the table is particularly striking.
Obviously this isn’t really a project for mere dabblers — consult your local carpenter or crafty person if this sounds cool to you. The materials, however, are pretty easy to come by. I mean, I sprinkle a new layer of sawdust on my apartment every week instead of cleaning. Saves so much time!
That's right, you can use the funeral webcast as a way to actively exclude those you don't like from the ceremony! You can also set a password, which is great for keeping out funereal voyeurs (if those exist?), but also, you know, that cousin with the lazy eye that owes everybody money. It also suggests that you watch the funeral from the library, which is just come on already. If you're trying to sell me on live funeral webcasting, Chris Hill, at least do it with a little dignity and tact. [Funeral Resources via Consumerist]
If you’re a parent, you know that kids love them some wooden tracks. I’m serious. Kids could would totally spend hours whining about tracks and then, when they get them, refuse to play with them. That’s why I love Ikea’s wooden train set which costs like $10 and can make a few nice configurations.
But how many configurations can you make? According to this dude you can make nine permutations, shown above. In fact, with four extra curved pieces you could create 130 permutations which is quite a treat.
Here are the instructions for building each version. Amazing stuff.
These instructions contain 15 characters C (clockwise curve), A (anticlockwise curve), S (straight piece) and B (the entire bridge). Here are the building instructions for all the shapes in the picture above:
AAAACCAAAASSAAB
CCCCCCSSAAAAAAB
CAAAAACASSAAAAB
CAAAAASCASAAAAB
CAAAAASSCAAAAAB
AAACAACAAASSAAB
ACAAAASACSAAAAB
ACAAAASSACAAAAB
AACAAASSAACAAAB
A new movie came out on DVD this week called The Invention Of Lying. It’s co-written, co-directed, and co-starring Golden Globe host Ricky Gervais and looks mildly entertaining enough that I want to rent it. So I load up Netflix to add it to my queue — but wait, according to Netflix, it’s not available until February 16. Why? Because it’s a Warner movie and as such is subject to Netflix’s idiotic new 28-day rule (they can’t rent Warner new releases on Netflix until after they’ve been available for purchase in retail store for 28 days). Well that’s just great. So all hope is lost, right? Nope. iTunes has it available for rent today.
Because Apple did not agree to enter into a deal with Hollywood that restricts them from renting movies during this 28-day window, it was available not only to buy but also to rent this past Tuesday on iTunes, the same day it was released on DVD. While iTunes has its own series of somewhat convoluted rules with regard to rentals (for example, some movies are restricted from being rented when airing on premium cable channels like HBO), in this instance, they hands down beat Netflix at their own game: rentals. And thanks to this new 28-day window, which the other major studios will undoubtedly have interest in getting from Netflix as well, this is something we could see a lot more of: iTunes, Amazon, Xbox Live, and yes, even Blockbuster Online being the go-to sources to rent new releases.
And that’s great news for those services which haven’t yet seen the rush of popularity that Netflix has enjoyed over the past several years. But Apple COO Tim Cook noted in an earnings call last year that iTunes movie rentals were a surprisingly strong part of the store and were helping drive Apple TV sales. People seem to like the idea of renting movies over iTunes, they just needed an incentive to do it more. This is it.
Sure, for a lot of people, a 28 day wait after waiting months for a movie to be released isn’t the end of the world. But a solid 30% of Netflix’s business is still people who rabidly want new releases when they come out. With Netflix no longer offering that option, they will turn elsewhere — and I don’t mean buying these movies. If they’re opposed to piracy (which will go up as a result of this window if all the studios get on board), they’ll turn to one of Netflix’s rivals in rentals. And with these companies’ living room hardware getting upgrades this year (Xbox in talks to get ESPN content, Apple TV likely to see a major upgrade, etc), there could be very enticing options. Not to mention a certain new Apple device likely getting unveiled next week that will probably support movie rental playback as well.
I understand why Netflix felt the need to cut this deal: on one hand, Hollywood was strong-arming them in a futile attempt stop their own DVD sales bleed. On the other, they want to secure what they believe is their future: streaming. But they’ve given their rivals a real opportunity with this 28-day window. Hopefully, one of them will take advantage of it.
[photo: flickr/snowkei]
A new product being developed in London will help the deaf to hear, using vibrations which can be felt through the skin. While the technology is still rudimentary, it has exciting potential for people who are completely deaf or deaf and blind.
Details are a bit sketchy at this point, but the concept is good: create a device that turns sound into vibration, enabling a person to “feel” when something happens around them. The device will work by registering different kinds of sounds and lowering the frequency to a range that can be felt through the skin. This means that someone who couldn’t hear previously will be able to tell if someone is speaking, if a telephone is ringing, or even make it so they can “hear” birdsong.
The technology is experimental, however the engineer developing it has had good results in initial trials. To read the entire press release, click here.
[via Shiny Shiny]
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Smartphones, Mobile
Apparently, a press release company accidentally released information about the Sony Ericsson Kurara (now known officially as “Vivaz”) before it was intended to be released. The news was subsequently yanked, but some have got their hands on the information.
The Sony Ericsson Kurara, which now bears an unfortunate official name, Vivaz, is a Symbian S60-based phone, featuring an 8.1 megapixel camera, GPS, 802.11b/g and Bluetooth. The phone uses microSD/microSDHC, seeing that Sony Ericsson has dropped support on Memory Stick Micro (M2) cards. It has a 3.5” 360x640 pixel touchscreen display. As with other Sony Ericsson phones, the camera looks pretty good as it supports HD 720p video recording (and playback, of course), with auto focus, face detection, smile detection and digital zoom. Unfortunately, it comes with an LED flash, rather than a Xenon flash.
It comes in 4 colors, Silver Moon, Cosmic Black, Galaxy Blue and Venus Ruby, and will be released in Q1 of 2010, at around $670 and $750.
Via [MobileCrunch]
Full Story » | Written by Cheng Hung for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
By the time Palm announced the Pixi Plus and Pre Plus at CES earlier this month, there wasn't a whole lot left to reveal. From the names, to the specs, all the way down to the carrier the handsets would launch on -- just about everything had made it into the realm of public knowledge by way of the rumor mill.
However, there was at least one feature that Palm managed to keep hidden up their sleeve: Mobile HotSpot. With the flick of a switch, the Mobile Hotspot application turns the Pre Plus or Pixi Plus into a WiFi router for up to 5 users simultaneously, fueled by Verizon's 3G network. We've spent the last few hours tinkering with a pre-release copy of Mobile HotSpot - read on for our impressions.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
So it wasn’t all bleak last year, SSD manufacturers experienced a 14% increase in sales, along with a total of over 11 million drives sold. That’s a whole lot of memory chips.
The study was conducted by IDC, and the outlook is good. Here’s some of the positive things that they had to say:
* Reduced IT spending in the last 18 months has led to cutbacks in NAND semiconductor production, slowing the decrease in price of SSDs. Long term though, the decline in NAND memory cost will lead to lower price points, making SSDs, especially those with high capacities, a more viable alternative to hard disk drives in certain segments.
* IDC believes that the largest market opportunity for SSDs will be in PCs. This will come largely from the notebook market where consumers will pay the extra cost of an SSD to gain the performance benefits. The netbook and other micro-computing devices are also driving forces in the adoption of SSDs, albeit at lower capacities.
* SSDs are making gains in the enterprise space due to the desire for increased performance, better utilization, faster access times, and lower power consumption.
If you want to read the whole thing, you’ll have to pay of course, but I think we get the idea.
[via Storage Review]
What if you could collect, in one well-organized, searchable, private digital repository, all the notes you create, clips from Web pages and emails you want to recall, dictated audio memos, photos, key documents, and more? And what if that repository was constantly synchronized, so it was accessible through a Web browser and through apps on your various computers and smart phones?
Well, such a service exists. And it’s free. It’s called Evernote. I’ve been testing it for about a week on a multiplicity of computers and phones, and found that it works very well. Evernote is an excellent example of hybrid computing—using the “cloud” online to store data and perform tasks, while still taking advantage of the power and offline ability of local devices.
The idea behind Evernote is to be a sort of digital file cabinet. It allows you to create “notebooks” containing items called notes. These notes can range from text to photos to many kinds of attached files. You can locate, group and peruse them quickly, without having to dig through a computer’s file system. When I first reviewed the product, back in 2005, Evernote was a Windows-only, purely local information organizer. Now it’s a multi-platform, Internet-savvy, synchronized place for your ideas.
You can sign up for Evernote free at evernote.com, and use it entirely as a Web-based application, through any of the major Web browsers. But Evernote also comes in customized versions for a staggering array of devices: Windows and Macintosh computers, and for all the major smart phones, including the iPhone; the BlackBerry; phones running Google’s Android operating system; the latest Palm (PALM) phones; and Windows Mobile phones.
This week, Evernote, which is made by a small Silicon Valley company of the same name, is introducing a totally revamped Windows version that brings the platform into parity with the company’s previously more advanced Macintosh version.
I tested Evernote on two Macs and two Windows PCs, as well as an iPhone, a Palm Pre phone and the new Nexus One phone from Google (GOOG). I also tried free plug-ins the company offers that make it easy to insert all or part of a Web page or email into an Evernote note. These are available for the Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome Web browsers, and for the Outlook email program. There are also system-wide Evernote buttons, which make capturing notes quicker, for Windows and the Mac.
I found Evernote works well for gathering ideas for business or personal projects, hobbies, or events you’re planning. When you see something or think of something you want to add, you can do it from whatever computer or phone is handy, and it will shortly appear on all of them.
Here are a few examples of how I used Evernote. I typed notes to myself on my desktops and laptops. I dictated a reminder to myself using the Evernote app on my iPhone. I used the Nexus One’s camera to take a picture of a person’s business card. I also copied text from Web pages, emails, and Word documents, and pasted them as notes. I even attached whole files to notes.
Within a few minutes, all of these notes were available on my personal Evernote Web site and from within all the Evernote apps on my computers and phones. I could search through them, email them, print them, group them with related items, or edit and annotate them.
Every Evernote user also gets a unique Evernote email address, and anything you email to that address goes into your repository as a new note. You also can use Twitter to get a note into Evernote.
The program has a few extra-cool features. If you create a note from a photo that includes printing, Evernote’s servers will try to figure out the words and make them searchable. This worked well in my tests with photos of business cards. And some smart-phone apps can save items directly into Evernote notes. One example I tested successfully was the Associated Press news app on the iPhone.
There are a few minor downsides to Evernote. While there’s no overall limit to the amount of data you can store, you can only upload 40 megabytes a month with the free version, attach certain types of files to notes, and you are forced to view ads. A premium version, which costs $5 a month, or $45 a year, increases the quota to 500 megabytes monthly, removes the ads, allows attaching any file type, and adds more features.
Also, I found the Evernote programs and apps, while similar, differ slightly depending on the capabilities of the platform they run on. Among the phone versions, for instance, the iPhone app is by far the most full-featured, and is currently the only one that can store whole notebooks offline, though the Android version is due to get that feature soon. Finally, the Evernote plug-in crashed Outlook on one of my Windows computers.
But, all in all, I found Evernote to be a valuable, easy-to-use tool that simplified my work and made good use of both the Internet and all my devices.
Find Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.
One problem with all those external drives out there is that they aren’t really stackable or easy to tell apart if you have more than one of the same. There are a thousand and one ways around this, of course, but can you really tell me that there is a better way to differentiate your storage media than by sticking each in its own 80s-kitsch VHS tape and sleeve? Seriously. I know I say “greatest thing of all time” with great frequency (once already today, in fact), but I can’t help doing it again in this case. I’d want a Transformers: The Movie one for sure, though.
[via The Daily What and Technabob]
The semi-rugged Samsung NB30, which was previously revealed during CES 2010, is now available for sale on Newegg. The Samsung NB30, built for rough usage, features a spill-resistant keyboard and a fingerprint-resistant lid that protects it from minor scratches. It also has a hard drive protection system, designed to protect your hard disk by shutting it off in the event of a fall.
The rest if the specs don’t really stand out among the sea of netbooks currently available on the market. It sports a 10.1” 1024x600 pixel display, a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor, 1GB of RAM, integrated GMA 3150 graphics, 160GB hard drive and 802.11b/g/n WiFi. It runs on Windows 7 Starter Edition, a lightweight version of Windows 7. Its 6 Cell 4400mAh Lithium Ion battery provides up to 6.5 hours of usage. It’s priced at $369.99 plus $4.99 for shipping.
Product [Newegg] Via [Liliputing]
Full Story » | Written by Cheng Hung for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Sounds like technology is making a difference in the lives of the victims of the Haitian earthquakes. Several different companies that produce products that use solar power have been sending equipment as part of the aid mission. Among the equipment are lights for hospitals and solar panels to help with water purification.
The solar powered lights are being placed in hospitals, enabling doctors to continue to work after dark, and the solar panels are being used to power water pumps used in the water purification process. In addition to water and light, a Dutch company is donating solar powered cell phones in order to help with communications. Last but not least, another American company is shipping solar powered ovens, which will allow people to cook without use of charcoal or other fuels.
[via Green Tech]
 Times Online | Regret on Himalayan Glaciers Estimate New York Times An international scientific panel overseen by the United Nations expressed “regret” on Wednesday for publishing an unsupported estimate of the speed at which Himalayan glaciers were melting. The estimate, included in a landmark ... UN Panel "Regrets" Exaggeration of Himalayan Thaw UN climate chiefs apologize UN Climate Change panel under fire after Himalayan glacier claim |
 SAMAA TV | Microsoft sues TiVo in AT&T solidarity play Register Microsoft has sued TiVo. Why? Because TiVo sued AT&T. Not to mention some allegations of patent infringement. Dow Jones reports that Microsoft filed suit against the leading DV recorder manufacturer late Tuesday in the US federal court. ... Microsoft Sues TiVo Microsoft files patent suit against TiVo Microsoft files patent-infringement lawsuit against TiVo |
 CBC.ca | Bill Gates Joins the Twitterati Wall Street Journal Microsoft's Bill Gates, shown in October, says he plans to 'share more about what I'm learning.' With little fanfare, Bill Gates joined the ranks of celebrities on Twitter this week. But if 140-character tweets aren't enough for you, ... Bill Gates shares his notes Bill Gates joins Twitter Bill Gates now on Twitter |
Perhaps Apple is getting ahead of itself. Even as the company plans to announce its “latest creation” on Jan. 27, one of its last creation’s key features — the ability for special-purpose accessories to communicate with iPhone apps — remains largely unused.
Integration between hardware accessories and iPhone apps was one of the standout new features of iPhone OS 3.0. By enabling iPhone apps to communicate with accessories over Bluetooth or through the dock connector, manufacturers and developers could augment the iPhone’s powers. Wired liked the idea so much we even coined an admittedly awkward term, dongleware, to describe these hybrids. And you, our readers, came up with some great suggestions for iPhone hardware/software add-ons.
With the addition of an accessory, the iPhone could potentially transform into a versatile electric guitar pedal (which was actually demonstrated at an Apple event by Line 6 and still hasn’t seen the light of day) or maybe even a light-switch controller. Game developers could ship special joysticks for their games. At Apple’s press event in March 2009 we even saw a special accessory that turned the iPhone into an insulin meter for diabetes patients to monitor their glucose levels.
Alas, dongleware never took off, either as a term or as a concept. We scoured the web and the show floor at the Consumer Electronics Show, and we even pitched a query through Help a Reporter Out begging for dongleware. All we found was a mere handful of app-powered iPhone accessories, most far less interesting than what Apple promised in its June 2009 keynote.
Mobile apps are a multi-billion-dollar industry, and the iPod and iPhone accessory market already surpass a billion dollars a year. We thought that by now dongleware would be a market overflowing with entrepreneurs eager to strike it rich in the App Store.
We’re not alone in wondering what happened.
“It’s been nine months since the 3.0 press event, plenty of time for hardware companies to get products out,” said Raven Zachary, president of Small Society, an iPhone app development house. “I think there are a handful, and only a handful. I’m surprised.”
Unsurprisingly, it turns out that creating new hardware products is harder than it looks, according to iPhone developers polled by Wired.com.
“When you talk about making a change for a hardware product, there’s a lot of planets to align,” said Matt Drance, Apple’s former iPhone evangelist who left the company to start his own iPhone app publishing company Bookhouse. “I think getting the planets to align has been a challenge for most people.”
To start with the obvious, creating and shipping hardware requires many more steps than coding a piece of software and submitting it to the App Store. You have to find manufacturing partners, perform product forecasting and plan inventory. And for the iPhone in particular, you must hire engineers who understand both hardware and coding for the iPhone OS.
A more arcane part of the dongleware-creation process involves gaining certification through Apple’s stringent “Made for iPod and Works With iPhone” licensing program. The purpose of the program is to ensure accessories meet certain technical standards, including FCC requirements.
For ThinkFlood founder Matthew Eagar, an independent entrepreneur who developed the RedEye universal remote app and accessory for iPhone, getting certified was his major challenge.
To gain certification, Eagar had to fly his staff to California to put his accessory through a cellphone testing lab at Cetecom. For his particular accessory, he had to ensure RedEye passed over-the-air testing to avoid interfering with the iPhone’s cell signal. The testing took many hours spread over several days.
“They had crazy requirements in terms of, you don’t want to interfere with the cell signal,” Eagar said. “It took us 10 weeks of back and forth and flying people around the country to spend time with these certification facilities.”
So naturally, it’s less likely we’ll see much dongleware from independent developers such as Eagar. Most of these products will likely come from larger companies who have been in the accessory industry for years.
Accessory maker Griffin, for example, in September 2009 released a piece of dongleware called the iTrip (above), a transmitter that broadcasts audio from an iPhone to an FM radio. On the iPhone, the iTrip app acts as the controller for setting the frequency. (With earlier iTrip models, you’d only be able to control the frequency with small plastic buttons on the transmitter.)
Griffin’s experience? Not even close to as difficult as it was for Eagar, thanks to an in-house staff of RF engineers who have been making gadget accessories for years.
“We always saw software as a way to get more value out of the hardware for us,” said Mark Rowan, president of Griffin. “Moving to iPhone integration was a very natural step for us because it met a business model we’ve been doing for 20 years.”
Rowan added that the size of the special-purpose iPhone accessory market is small, and perhaps that’s because we don’t need many. The iPhone, after all, strives to be an all-in-one device with the help of apps rather than physical hardware. With over 100,000 apps in the App Store and counting, it’s doing a pretty good job at that.
“I don’t think there will ever be the same kinds of numbers in hardware integration apps as the non, because I don’t think there needs to be,” he said. “There are plenty of opportunities for games and information on the phone if all you need is the 3G access, to pull all kinds of data down. There are plenty of apps that work perfectly fine without any extra hardware.”
See Also:
Photo: Fr3d.org/Flickr
By the time Palm announced the Pixi Plus and Pre Plus at CES earlier this month, there wasn’t a whole lot left to reveal. From the names, to the specs, all the way down to the carrier the handsets would launch on — just about everything had made it into the realm of public knowledge by way of the rumor mill.
However, there was at least one feature that Palm managed to keep hidden up their sleeve: Mobile HotSpot. With the flick of a switch, the Mobile Hotspot application turns the Pre Plus or Pixi Plus into a WiFi router for up to 5 users simultaneously, fueled by Verizon’s 3G network. We’ve spent the last few hours tinkering with a pre-release copy of Mobile HotSpot – read on for our impressions.
The Setup:
Attempting to explain how simple it is to set up Mobile HotSpot is probably more difficult than actually setting it up. You install it, flip the switch from “off” to “on”, and then choose a password. Bam! Within about 5 seconds, you’ve got a new WiFi hotspot waiting for you in your list of available networks. Remember the first time you plugged in a mouse via USB and it fired right up while you were digging around for the instructions on what to do next? It’s like that, except you’re not even plugging anything in.
Operation:
Like the setup process, keeping it all running couldn’t be much simpler. Want to change the name of the network? Tap the name, punch in a new one. Want to change the password? Same deal. If you forget your password or need to share it with a friend without shouting it to the entire room, they’ve got a “Show Passphrase” button right at the top – tap it once and your password is revealed, tap it again and it’s obfuscated. Palm has made this as absolutely, drop-dead simple as they possibly could have, and it’s a really great experience.
Oddly, there’s no way to manage connected users. While you’re alerted the instant someone connects and there’s a running list of everyone who is currently connected, there isn’t any means of disconnecting users without changing the password. This probably won’t be an issue as long as you play it smart with your security info, but it’s still something we expected to see.
Also strange: there’s no data usage meter. Considering that Verizon’s charging $40 bucks (on top of the normal voice/data plan fees) for 5 gigs of 3G Hotspot access with an overage fee of 5 cents per megabyte (or roughly 51 bucks per gigabyte), I’d imagine that people are going to want to keep a close eye on just how much data they’re gobbling up. Sure, you can find these numbers in your Verizon account pages – but why can’t the application pull that same information down, or at least provide the data for the current session for the sake of keeping tabs on things?
Battery:
This is not something you’re going to want to run all the time, unless you’re near an outlet. As we probably could have expected out of any application that is simultaneously pulling and pushing a ton of data, Mobile Hotspot hammers the battery. Even when no clients are connected, we were noticing the battery drain about 50% faster than it otherwise would.
The more people you’ve got connected simultaneously, the faster it’ll drain the battery; with 2-3 people pulling down a fair share of data, you can probably expect to drain this thing dead in about 3 hours.
Speed:
Ah, speed. Once you’re all setup, it’s the most important factor.
Unfortunately, our tests in this department were.. inconclusive, to say the least. Verizon seemed to be having some issues in my little corner of Central California today; while the network seemed stable enough at first glance, the speeds I was seeing were considerably slower than normal.
I ran speed tests across the Pre Plus, Pixi Plus, and Verizon Mifi, all of which were averaging about 85 kilobytes per second for both upload and download. I generally see download speeds that are very, very much faster than that. With that said, I’ve seen no evidence that suggests the Mobile HotSpot app pushes data out at speeds any slower than a MiFi or a dedicated Verizon mobile broadband dongle; as far as I can tell, it’s matching them kilobyte-for-kilobyte. Up until we sat down to do the formal testing, Verizon’s network — and the Mobile HotSpot app — were awesomely fast.
Your mileage will obviously vary from region to region, but I wouldn’t expect Mobile Hotspot to be the bottleneck. I’ll run a few more tests in other locales over the next few days and update accordingly.
Conclusions:
Simple to set up? Check! Simple to use? Save for a few trivial nitpicks, check! Nice and speedy? Well, as much as my local Verizon towers will allow at the moment.
While AT&T continues to promise that tethering on the iPhone is just around the corner, Verizon and Palm have launched what is quite possibly the slickest tethering solution to ever grace a mobile handset. The $40 monthly price tag seems a bit steep considering the 5 gigabyte cap, but that same 5 gigabyte plan would set you back $60 if you instead opted for a MiFi.
At this price, it’s certainly not for everyone – but if you’ve got a need for multi-person mobile broadband and were already looking to pick up a Pre Plus or Pixi Plus, it’s your best bet.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Okay, this is the most dedication I’ve ever seen to model-making. Even more than those hentai fanatics and their Rei Ayanami figures. This guy spent I don’t know how long making a ~1/6th size model of a SU-27. I started clicking through the pages, thinking there would be around 10. Spoiler alert: there are 83. And nearly a thousand photos, documenting every tiny, tiny rivet and detail being done. Modelers, get ready to spend a couple hours in increasing astonishment. For the rest of you, I collected a few choice shots.
The chosen scale is 1/ 6.5 resulting in a length of 3375 mm and a wingspan of 2300 mm ( including weapon stations )
As far as I can tell, he just got the manual for making a real SU-27 and just divided everything by 6. Every little rivet and hatch is accurately represented. There’s even a little guy in the cockpit! And by the way, I can’t be the only who who thought that the little kid in the pictures was actually going to grow up and go to college while this thing was being built.
And here’s the video of its certification flight. I think it was being certified as “the most awesome thing ever.”
Anyway. Not exactly news, but buddy, this is worth sharing.
[via Reddit]
 Telegraph.co.uk | Microsoft Scrambles to Patch Browser Wall Street Journal Microsoft Corp. raced to release a fix for a security hole in its Internet Explorer Web browser as the company sought to contain the fallout from governments urging users to switch to competing software. ... Microsoft to release patch for IE hole on Thursday Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10-002 Coming Thursday for IE Zero-Day Microsoft patching "Google hack" flaw in IE tomorrow |
FROM GAMERTELL - The message from the video game industry is coming across clearly: Pirate games, go to jail.
MORE »
Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
We did a little roast beast this year on Christmas, and although it turned out great, there was a huge amount of consternation involving variations in oven temperature, at what intervals to re-baste, and that sort of thing. If only there were a precision cooking instrument in which I could put a vacuum-packed hunk of meat and have it suspended in a perfect mass of temperature-controlled water — oh, there is?
The SousVide Supreme Water Oven is a slow-cooker’s fantasy, and as long as your food doesn’t need to get too much past 200°F. The vacuum sealing is, of course, terribly eco-unfriendly, but it does make the meat, or apples, or whatever you put in there, stew in nothing but its own juices.
One caveat: without a hot pan, grill, or oven, and with the food basting itself, there is a side effect. According to a New York Times review:
Although amazing flavor infusion can take place inside the bag (a skirt steak I sealed with bacon fat, then cooked for two days, was memorable), the food emerges unnervingly pale and soft.
Very appetizing! Well, the proof of the pudding is in the taste, they say, and apparently the taste is insanely good. Too bad this thing costs $449 and you’ll need a vacuum sealer to do the job correctly as well.
[via RedFerret]
 Sydney Morning Herald | Bing on the iPhone: Has Apple's Holy War Shifted? PC World Some of tech's biggest battle lines may soon be shifting. Apple is in talks to make Bing the iPhone's default search engine, according to a report published in BusinessWeek today. Microsoft's search would replace the iPhone's current default -- yep, ... Microsoft, Apple Could Make Bing an iPhone Default, Says Report Microsoft Boosts Bing Search Privacy Apple is searchin' |
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 TG Daily | Kids pack in nearly 11 hours of media use daily CNET A new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows a "dramatic" rise in the amount of time children and teens spend using entertainment media, "especially among minority youth." The study, "Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to ... Teen Media Consumption Soars to Almost 8 Hours/Day Kids stay plugged in for longer, study finds Digital Media Dominates Kids' Waking Hours |
By Jessica E. Vascellaro, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Google Inc.’s (GOOG) YouTube said it will begin testing a new video-rental service on Friday, starting with movies from the Sundance Film Festival.
YouTube, which announced the move in a blog post, also plans to allow people to begin renting videos in the health, education and fitness categories in the coming weeks.
A company spokesman said that content partners get to set the price they want to charge consumers and that customers must pay through Google’s payment service, Google Checkout.
Google and the content partner will split the revenue, with the partner getting the majority, he said.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile
T-Mobile has just lowered the pricing on two BlackBerry handsets. The models that were graced with lower pricing include the Bold 9700 and Curve 8520. As far as how much lower, the Bold 9700 was lowered from $199.99 down to $129.99 and the Curve 8520 from $129.99 down to $79.99. Not bad for either model, of course, you will still be required to sign a two-year agreement in order to see that price.
Read [T-Mobile] Via [phoneArena]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Fans of Boxee who are tired of re-runs of Lost and clips of Anderson Cooper on CNN could soon have some new paid content to watch.
Boxee plans to release a “payment platform” this summer that will allow users to purchase TV shows, movies or applications with their remote. The move will bring content that was previously not available to Boxee users, says the company.
“The content owners will be able to package and price as they wish, including pay-per-view and subscription,” Avner Ronen, Boxee CEO wrote on the company blog. “Content partners will have the flexibility to decide what they make available, whether it’s premium content, content from their existing library, or extras that will never make it on air.”
In turn, Boxee will take a cut–at less than 30 percent–of every transaction.
Boxee aggregates content from different sources such as TV channels, online video and even Netflix. The company has become popular with users who want to stream content from their PCs to their TV. Boxee’s software is available for free. The company plans to launch a set-top boxlater this year in in partnership with D-Link.
Free content aggregation has caused problems for Boxee. Last year, Hulu twice shut down Boxee’s access to it. Boxee responded by releasing a work-around. Hulu and Boxee have declared cease fire for now.
Hulu may have made the right move. Meanwhile, Boxee’s paid platform could reassure content companies and TV channels of the software’s ability to monetize its users. Ronen believes the internet will be the fourth method of distribution for content after cable, satellite and IPTV such as AT&T’s u-Verse.
“The connected living room represents a new medium, one in which great value could be generated,” he says.
But when it comes to content partnerships, can Boxee really beat iTunes to get the kind of shows or movies that users will pay for?
See Also:
Photo: Boxee (fatcontroller/Flickr)
I’m waiting for e-book devices that allow the reader to highlight text. This is essential for students reading textbooks, and for nonfiction readers. Any chance of that happening?
A: Your wait is over. Major e-book readers I’ve tested, such as Amazon.com’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader Daily Edition, already allow highlighting. In other words, you can select any section of text in a book and give it a gray background so it stands out from the rest of the text, persistently. It’s not yellow or any other color, because the screens are grayscale and don’t display colors, but it is highlighting. You can also add notes on e-readers.
I have a Mac laptop that I use at home with Safari and Firefox installed. My office environment uses Windows and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8. One of the features of IE8 that I really like and often use are “Accelerators.” I would like to know if there are accelerators available for download for the most up-to-date versions of either Safari or Firefox.
A: Accelerators are a particular feature of IE8 that allows users to perform an action on a highlighted portion of a Web page—like mapping an address or translating a word—even using services provided by companies that compete with Microsoft. Microsoft has put a system in place for companies to write accelerators and users to download them.
Firefox, on both Windows and Mac, has a massive collection of add-ons, some of which work in a manner similar to Accelerators, but it doesn’t have a directly competing feature. Safari on your Mac also can accommodate added features from third-party companies, some of which can work like accelerators, but it also lacks a feature that specifically goes head to head with IE8’s Accelerators.
I am going to law school in the fall, and I was wondering which laptop you would suggest I get for this three- to four-year time period of my life?
A: It really depends on your priorities, resources and environment. If you’re on a tight budget, value lots of choice, and enjoy playing games during breaks from work, you might pick a modestly-priced Windows 7 laptop. However, I’d stay away from netbooks, which can be cramped for writing long documents. If you have more to spend, and value freedom from malware, great built-in software and the convenience of dedicated stores, you might buy an Apple MacBook or MacBook Pro. But I would also recommend asking the school and current students, since it can be advantageous, or even necessary, to be using a laptop that the school prefers or that runs any special software the school requires.
You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online for free at the All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
FROM GAMERTELL - When an earthquake devastated Haiti, Gaians act to provide support through donations. click through to find out how Gaia Online will match your donations…
MORE »
Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Section: Audio, Portable Audio, Video, Portable Video, Communications, Cellphones, Smartphones, Mobile
It is still unclear as to whether or not the Windows Mobile 7 and Zune rumors are true, but that did not stop Iyaz Akhtar, Kevin Tofel of jkOnTheRun.com and myself from trying to make some sense of them today. You can watch the video here, or head on over to Tech Vi where you can see the episode we just wrapped up as well as many others.
Watch [TechVi]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Section: Web, Web 2.0 / Social Networking
Twitter is back up and returning to normal following a service disruption that knocked the site offline for nearly 2 hours earlier this morning. Twitter’s official blog had this to say about the incident:
We are experiencing an outage due to an extremely high number of whales. Our on-call team is working on a fix.
Update (5:18a): We are recovering from this incident. A sudden failure coupled with problems in switching to a backup system produced a high number of errors for around 90 minutes. This made the site largely inaccessible. No data was lost or compromised during this outage.
While the outage was inconvenient for some, in all fairness Twitter has been doing quite well since the major DDoS attack that knocked it and several other sites offline back in August. Still no word on what caused the “sudden failure” but it happened just after the news broke that another major earthquake had struck Haiti, leading some to wonder if a large volume of tweets about the event is to blame.
Read [Twitter Blog]
Full Story » | Written by Sue Walsh for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
![Screen shot 2010-01-20 at [ January 20 ] 12.34.46 PM](http://www.mobilecrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Screen-shot-2010-01-20-at-January-20-12.34.46-PM.png "Screen shot 2010-01-20 at [ January 20 ] 12.34.46 PM")
Earlier this week, Skype offered up a few bucks of SkypeOut credit to anybody in Haiti; shortly thereafter, Google announced that any calls made to Haiti via Google Voice would be free of charge. Now, Verizon Wireless has joined the effort to connect people with their Haitian cohorts, without charging a dime.
Verizon Wireless has just announced that any fees accrued for long distance calls made to Haiti until January 31st will be waived. Taking it one step further, they’re retroactively waiving any charges for calls made to Haiti from the day the earthquake hit (January 12th) until today. The only catch: you’ll need to be on a monthly bill (in other words, not prepaid) for Verizon to be able to waive the charges; we’re guessing that’s more of a technicality than it is Verizon’s choice.
For more details, check out the press release here.
Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
With all the crap that’s gone on (and still going on) between AT&T and Verizon, it’s safe to say that this is the last thing AT&T wanted to come out. According to a study that just came out, AT&T would have to spend approximately $5 billion US to get their network to the same level as Verizon and Sprint.
This probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone who actually owns an AT&T phone, given the almost constant problems with dropped calls, spotty service, and slow data speeds. The study also admits that AT&T has started to upgrade their infrastructure, particularly in the Bay Area, with positive results. This makes sense give the nature of their agreement with Apple.
[Via PCWorld]
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Robotics company Willow Garage is giving 10 of its robots free to researchers in return for a promise that they will share their development efforts with the open-source community.
“The hardware is designed to be a software developer’s dream with a lot of compute power inside and many of the annoying problems with general robotic platforms taken care of,” says Steve Cousins, CEO of Willow Garage. “We have created a platform that is going to accelerate the development of personal robotics.”
Despite hundreds of researchers working worldwide in the area of robotics, their development efforts tend to be proprietary. Researchers may be working on similar problems but they rarely share code or hardware.
Willow Garage was founded in 2006 with the idea of creating an open-source hardware and software platform. In addition to its hardware prototype, Willow Garage has also developed the Robot Operating System (ROS), which originated at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ROS is based on Linux and can work with both Windows and Mac PCs.
Cousins says Willow Garage’s giveaway is targeted at research labs, rather than the DIY hobbyist.
“Utilization is an important criteria for us,” he says. “Rather than give the robots away to someone in a garage somewhere, we would prefer to give it to a lab where a lot of students can work on it.”
To get their free robot, interested labs and researchers have to submit a letter of intent to the company by the end of the month, and follow up with a full proposal by March 1. Ultimately, they will have to make their software code available as open source.
Here’s what the researchers will get with the PR2 robot.
PR2 has two eight-core Xeon system servers on-board, each with 24 GB of RAM; a 500GB internal hard drive; and a 1.5TB external removable drive.
The robot has accelerometers and pressure sensors distributed across its head, arms and base. Its head contains two stereo camera pairs coupled with an LED projector, a 5MP camera and a tilting laser range finder. The forearms each have an Ethernet-based wide-angle camera.
The robot’s two arms have almost the same range of motion as human arms, says Willow Garage, and its spine is extensible so it can reach objects on countertops. (More details of the PR2 hardware.)
PR2 comes with a 1.2 kWh battery pack that has on-board chargers and the capacity for about two hours of run-time.
Check out a video of the PR2 robot navigating through eight doors and plugging its power cord into nine different outlets.
See Also:
Photo: PR2 robot/Willow Garage
What if in addition to a tablet, Apple made another huge announcement at next week’s press event, like a Verizon iPhone? That’s what an analyst is predicting.
“We believe there is a good chance that the ‘One more thing…’ part of next week’s presentation may include two iPhone-related announcements: namely, the release of iPhone OS 4.0 and the unveiling of iPhone 4G coming to Verizon in June,” writes Canaccord Adams’ Peter Misek in a note to clients Wednesday.
Misek said he and his semi-conductor partners believe the Asian supply chain is prepping for mass production of a CDMA Verizon iPhone in March with plans to begin selling the device in June. He added that an “iPhone 4GS” on the next-generation Long Term Evolution (LTE) network will likely arrive next year.
While I won’t completely dismiss the possibility of a Verizon iPhone launched in June, I believe it’s unlikely Apple will make such an announcement next week. Apple introduced both the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS at the Worldwide Developers Conference held in June of 2008 and June of 2009, respectively. WWDC is an annual event, and I see no reason for Apple to fire all of its ammo at next week’s presumed tablet event, only to leave customers waiting five months for a Verizon iPhone. (Apple did announce the original iPhone during Macworld Expo in January 2007 and release the device five months later, but based on the greater success of the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, we doubt Apple would revert.)
With all that said, if there is a Verizon iPhone, I’d expect it to be announced at WWDC 2010, which will likely be held June. It would be wise for Apple to save such big news to attract attention to the event. But consider me a skeptic. Other than a few analysts making guesses based on conversations with supply-chain partners, I’ve seen zero solid evidence suggesting a Verizon iPhone is arriving this year. My guess is Apple would wait until 2011 for Verizon to roll out its 4G LTE network to help sell the iPhone on a brand spanking new network.
Via Fortune
See Also:
Photo: Fr3d/org/Flickr
FROM APPLETELL - Since Bill Snyder at PCWorld.com finds it acceptable to tear apart the usefulness of a device that’s still just a rumor, I feel comfortable in refuting his claims with some indefensible beliefs of my own.
MORE »
Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
It seems that Apple may be inviting Microsoft’s Bing into the iPhone, at least according to BusinessWeek. In what could be some sort of bluff by Apple, Microsoft is apparently in talks to make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone, supplanting Google’s current position on the phone deck.
This does not mention if they’re moving away from Google Maps and YouTube, but by giving Microsoft the default search spot Apple could get a bit more revenue from traffic thrown at the provider.
BusinessWeek is positing that recent competitive moves by like the release of the Nexux One could have something to do with the decision to pursue another partner.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
There’s no shortage of Twitter clients for BlackBerry. Lets see; there’s Seesmic, SocialScope, UberTwitter, TweetGenius.. hell, there’s not even a shortage of good Twitter clients for BlackBerry.
That hasn’t stopped RIM from building one of their own, though. It’s not available yet – nor is it even officially official – but the above shot of it leaked out today on Mexican blogger Javier Matuk’s Twitter feed. According to Javier, the client was floating around at a recent BlackBerry launch event south of the border, where the shot was snapped.
If we believe the whisperings of the rumor mill, RIM’s client ought to support just about everything we’d expect of a native Twitter client when it (purportedly) launches in February, from basics like following/unfollowing to the notable perks like battery-friendly push alerts. What say you, BlackBerry-toting Twitterers? What would make you jump to a RIM-endorsed Twitter client?
(Oh, and how bummed must the developers of other BlackBerry Twitter clients feel right about now? You know RIM’s probably going to preload this onto new devices once it’s ready — and, for that matter, push it to some of the old ones)
[BlackBerryRocks via IntoMobile]
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
U.S. filmmaker Dan Woolley was shooting a documentary about the impact of poverty in Haiti when the earthquake struck. He could have died, but he ultimately survived with the help of an iPhone first-aid app that taught him to treat his wounds.
After being crushed by a pile of rubble, Woolley used his digital SLR to illuminate his surroundings and snap photos of the wreckage in search of a safe place to dwell. He took refuge in an elevator shaft, where he followed instructions from an iPhone first-aid app to fashion a bandage and tourniquet for his leg and to stop the bleeding from his head wound, according to an MSNBC story.
The app even warned Woolley not to fall asleep if he felt he was going into shock, so he set his cellphone’s alarm clock to go off every 20 minutes. Sixty-five hours later, a French rescue team saved him.
“I just saw the walls rippling and just explosive sounds all around me,” said Woolley, recounting the earthquake to MSNBC. “It all happened incredibly fast. David yelled out, ‘It’s an earthquake,’ and we both lunged and everything turned dark.”
Woolley’s incident highlights a large social implication of the iPhone and other similar smartphones. A constant internet connection, coupled with a device supporting a wealth of apps, can potentially transform a person into an all-knowing, always-on being. In Woolley’s case, an iPhone app turned him into an amateur medic to help him survive natural disaster.
Say what you will about the iPhone. This story is incredible.
Update: As Wired reader “bbqbologna” noted in the comments below, the app used in question was Pocket First Aid and CPR. A user review by “Webguydan” reads, “Consulted this app, while trapped under Hotel Montana in Haiti earthquake, to treat excessive bleeding and shock. Helped me stay alive till I was rescued 64 hours later.”
See Also:
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Section: Communications, Cellular Providers, Mobile
In yet another display of censorship, China has announced it will begin scanning all text messages. The messages will automatically be scanned for keywords provided by the police. Any messages flagged and found to contain the keywords will be deemed “unhealthy” and the government has ordered cell providers to cut off service to the senders.
The government claims it is doing this as part of its efforts to protect citizens from pornography. It has already shut down hundreds of sites and issued threats of punishment to Google, ordering it to remove all traces of porn from search results or face stiff consequences.
China is becoming infamous for its increasing efforts to control its citizens’ Internet access. Late last year it angered computer makers when it decreed that all computers sold in that country have special government approved filtering software installed. The software was programmed to block certain sites, and while the government claimed they were all porn sites, many were skeptical.
Really makes you glad you live in a free country, doesn’t it?
Read [NYTimes]
Full Story » | Written by Sue Walsh for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Don’t you just hate it when some big dumb press release company spills the beans on your top secret product long before you intended? Wait, you’ve never experienced that? Well, neither have we. We were just trying to, you know, connect with our readers or something.
Sony Ericsson, on the other hand, has felt that burn. Just today, in fact! We’d already heard rumors and tales of an 8 megapixel Symbian phone called the Sony Ericsson Kurara; thanks to some mis-scheduling, it’s now about as official as things get.
Here’s what we learned before they pulled down the presser:
One detail the press release skimped on was the price. According to the dudes over at PhoneArena, we should expect it to come in somewhere between $670 and $750 bucks.
Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
FROM GAMERTELL - The PS3’s motion controller has been delayed until Fall 2010 so that more varied titles can take advantage of its features.
MORE »
Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
![Screen shot 2010-01-20 at [ January 20 ] 8.42.16 AM](http://www.mobilecrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Screen-shot-2010-01-20-at-January-20-8.42.16-AM-148x300.png "Screen shot 2010-01-20 at [ January 20 ] 8.42.16 AM")
Between UI enhancements, bug fixes, and neat new features like smooth scrolling, Skyfire has been slamming out the updates as of late — but only for one platform. While the Flash/Silverlight-capable mobile browser is available for both Windows Mobile and Symbian, the latter edition hasn’t seen any updates in months… until today.
Just minutes ago, Skyfire pushed version 1.5 of their browser out for Symbian S60 3rd and 5th edition phones. This update makes Skyfire for Symbian a feature-for-feature match with its WinMo counterpart.
So what’s new? Two things, primarily: the UI has been tweaked dramatically to be less stylus-centric and more finger-friendly, and they’ve added “Kinetic scrolling” (a fancy way of saying “it scrolls like the iPhone”) to both the S60 3rd and 5th edition releases. The S60 5th edition release, however, gets a few bonus tricks: full screen browsing mode, and accelerometer-based auto-rotation.
If you’ve never checked Skyfire out, it’s absolutely worth a look. It pipes the web through a remote proxy before sending it to your handset, shrinking everything down to a more mobile-friendly size. In the end, that works out to faster page loads than you might see elsewhere – oh yeah, and a little something called Flash/Silverlight playback support, which is still a mostly mythical beast in the mobile world.
You can get skyfire at get.skyfire.com
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Sanyo has brought its electric Eneloop bike to the US, and when we were in CES we got to take a look. It’s certainly not the first electric bike around: Even Sanyo has been making them in Japan since the early 1970s. But it is one of the easiest to ride for a regular cyclist, and - because it carries the Eneloop brand - it is one of the greenest in terms of energy use.
The bike is a front-wheel drive (you can see the hub in the video) with the rear wheel assembly being completely standard, just like a normal pedal-bike. The magic is twofold. First, a special bottom-bracket monitors how hard you press on the pedals. This controls the motor in the hub and gives a power boost. There is no assistance when you are freewheeling on the flat, but as soon as you push the motor kicks in. The initial feeling is how I’d imagine a robot exo-skeleton to feel, but right away you don’t notice it anymore and it just feels like the bike is really easy to ride.
The second trick is also a hub/pedal double-team. If you are going down a hill and not pedaling, the hub will turn into a generator and re-juice the batteries. A sensor in the brake lever also switches the motor into regeneration mode. This increases battery life by around 20%, which gives a total of up to 46 miles on a charge (that charge takes three hours).
The power has other benefits. The lights of course run off the battery, but because of the sensors in the brake levers, there is a brake light, too.
Riding the Eneloop bike feels almost exactly like riding a normal bike, so it is well suited to aging cyclists who just can’t make it up the steep hills anymore. The problem is that it costs $2,000. That’s still a lot less than a car or motorbike, and if you are a keen cyclist who is having trouble staying on the road, or if you want to get fit but are a little too rotund to get started, $2,000 is a bargain.
Sanyo Eneloop Electric Assist Bike Recharges Itself [Wired Video]
SANYO ‘eneloop bike’ Electric Hybrid Bicycle Makes First San Diego Debut [Sanyo]
Who knows what’s going on over in London right now but there are a few blolgers chilling out waiting for Nokia to launch something huge in 19 hours. The best thing? You can embed their little countdown thinger into your own blog, thereby completing the circle of blog wonkery. Writes symbian-guru:
Nokia has begun sending invites out to select media outlets (such as Engadget), inviting them to an event on this Thursday in London at the Paramount Club. The invite mentions that there is big Ovi news, but the press event is only 15 minutes, followed quickly by a Q&A session, so it’s not likely to be a major announcement, really.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 Reuters | Apple: The great market maker CNET A few months ago, you had no desire for a tablet computer. The market, after all, has hyped tablets for years, to little effect. Now, with Apple expected to launch its tablet, you've mortgaged your house so you can buy one. ... Will Apple's Tablet Be a Gaming Device? Why do you want an Apple tablet? What can we expect from the Apple iTablet? |
Believe it or not, this electronic guitar is actually a Gentoo Linux box, running a 500MHz AMD Geode processor, an 8.4-inch, 800×600 LCD touch screen with an SSH server and a MIDI output. It is made of milled, solid plastic, and could probably be hooked up to Rock Band. But that is to rob it of the romance. Listen:
Yes, it rocks. The instrument, called Misa, is really a guitar-shaped computer, a midi controller whose “frets” are in fact 144 keycaps. The screen control works in four directions, allowing control of two sound parameters simultaneously. These can really be anything you can program into a MIDI device, but in the video the y-xis is set to control note velocity and the x-axis controls distortion in the form of a “digitaliser filter”.
The Misa has been designed, and will be sold by Michael, a software engineer. He made it because current guitar MIDI controllers still use strings, which are limited in what they can do to control the sound. To be clear, and to stave off the inevitable luddite comments, the Misa is not intended to replace, or even improve on, the guitar. It is a new instrument entirely, which happens to borrow the guitar’s interface. In this it is clearly better than the hideous keyboard “guitars” that haunted the 1980s.
Michael plans to set a price within the next day or two. If we may suggest one thing, it would be a change of name. “Misa” sounds much too much like something the loathsome Jar Jar Binks would say.
Misa Digital Guitar [Misa Digital via The Raw Feed]
See Also:
If you have $200 you were thinking of tossing in the trash, you could instead send it to me. I promise to waste it on booze and Cuban cigars. Or you could waste it yourself, and buy the Aputure Gigtube Instant Digital Screen Remote Viewfinder, a tiny, low-resolution screen on a short cable that duplicates the functionality of your camera’s current screen, only with lower quality.
The Gigtube is a 2.5 inch, 230,000 pixel LCD with three hours of battery life. It hooks into your camera (just how depends on the camera you have) and displays the live-view feed from a “distance”. Some cameras will not output a live-view, so you’re limited to reviewing the shot after it has been taken, a rather useless feature on its own. The Gigtube has one neat trick: it can be used to trigger the camera’s shutter remotely (and here “remotely” means up to 2 meters, or just over six feet).
For what might you use the Gigtube? The pictures on the site appear to suggest narcissistic self-portraits and up-skirt-shots. In fact, anything that “bring photography in a new visual angle”. The unit will work with most Canon, Nikon and Olympus DSLRs, along with the Olympus Pen v1 and v2. Sure, you could buy one, but you should really do the sensible thing and let me send your cash up in wonderful, tasty smoke.
Gigtube Instant Digital Screen Remote Viewfinder [Aputure via Oh Gizmo!]
It seems that the world has finally discovered that the traditional camera strap is neither comfortable nor practical. The weight of the camera causes neck strain after mere moments, even with a lightweight camera, and when you are walking around it will bounce against your belly.
A new kind of strap is emerging, and the Sun Sniper is the latest in the line of across-the-shoulder designs. Like the LumaLoop and the Black Rapid R-Strap, the bandolier-style strap keeps the camera comfortably at the hip and avoids neck strain. It also has the same kind of free-running loop that lets the suspended camera glide along the main strap and up to your eye without administering friction-burns to your armpit.
I have tried a few home-made shoulder-straps, and they are certainly easier to wear and use than even the fanciest weight-reducing neck-strap. The problem that all of these commercial straps share is that they connect to a mount that screws into the tripod socket. Balance-wise, the positioning is perfect. Safety-wise, it’s a terrible idea — the screw cannot lock, and the spinning and twisting of the camera as it dangles can work things loose in no time.
The ballistic-nylon Sun Sniper adds a shock-absorbing section just below the shoulder, and costs $70, which is sadly in the right range for these straps. My money would go on the LumaLoop, as it can hook up to the strap eyelets of the camera, the parts which are designed to hold the weight safely. As I am a cheapskate, I shall likely stick with my new home-made shoulder/wrist strap combo, fashioned from $2-worth of hardware-store gear just yesterday. If it lasts a week, I’ll tell you how I did it.
Sun Sniper One [Sniper Sniper]
See Also:
| World : News Archives | Business | Entertainment | Sports | Technology | Science | Marketplace Audio |
| India : News | Business | Entertainment | Sports | Telugu | |
| Blogs : Humor pages | Norkay's Blog | Kids Stories | Indian Recipes | Database Tech Blog |
| Sundries : World Video Clips | Songs Clips | Indian Video Clips | |
Amazon has announced that it will open up the Kindle e-reader to third party developers, allowing applications, or what Amazon calls “active content”, to run on the device.
Chris sez, "Digital RPG vendor DriveThruRPG.com, in conjunction with a number of gaming companies, is offering a coupon good for a total of $1481 worth of digital RPG products in return for a $20 donation to help Haiti. The assortment includes a number of popular indy titles, as well as the tie-in RPG to Joss Whedon's Firefly, Serenity. Even gamers who would not otherwise care about Haiti might find this deal attractive for its own sake."
What’s the 