Other Android App News

• An Embryonic Build of Firefox for Android
• Motoblur Makes Its Way to Verizon via Devour
• A Neat Video of 50 Android Games
• How to Overclock the Crap Outta Your Droid
• How to Circumvent Android 2.1's Word Filter
• T-Mobile's Bundling DoubleTwist for Media Syncing with New Android Phones
• A Guide to Tethering Your Android Phone
• HTC's Espresso Sense UI for Droid, If You Can Hack It
• Our Nexus One Review

This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this month, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous monthly roundups here. See ya next month.

EU Committee Says No To Bank Data Sharing

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Netherlands Enters The Climate Fray

Online Video Explodes (PC World)

Cutest Japanese stopmotion crocheted beachside critter ukelele video ever

Mark usually has Boing Boing's ukelele beat covered, and Lisa's our go-to Japan expert. But neither of those guys are blogging today, so here goes. U900, "Diamond Head" Japanese Ukulele Duo! Features a crocheted bear and a bunny on a beach, and is the very definition of kawaii. They has a myspace, too. (thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

Update: Mark previously blogged an earlier video from these cuties, "Walk, Don't Run."


Source: Boing Boing | 6 Feb 2010 | 12:25 pm

Traveling with batteries and ordering gadgets online could soon get pricey

Here are two totally unrelated things I like to do: order gadgets and smartphones online, and travel with loads of spare batteries. Well, perhaps they’re not all that unrelated. Both offer a lot of convenience and save a good amount of cash, but with a new proposal from the U.S. Department of Transportation, that could all soon change.

We’ve all seen exploding iPods, cell phones and laptops thanks to faulty Lithium-Ion batteries and connectors, so the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration wants to make air travel much safer by changing the policies on shipping and transporting these dangerous goods. Ultimately, vendors and shipping companies would be forced to use stronger and safer packaging for LiIon batteries or gadgets which contain them. These costs would undoubtedly be passed onto us, the consumers.

But wait, there’s more! Tightening down on these battery rules would make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to carry spare batteries in your check-in luggage. It’s not just LiIon batteries in question as NiMH and alkaline batteries would be prohibited from checked luggage, too. I’m all about safety when traveling, but if these proposals pass, traveling could easily become a pain – more so than it is now.

Maybe Hulu is right to block Boxee?

If I may, I’d like to play devil’s advocate to something I wrote a few days ago. To quickly summarize, Boxee took issue with NBCU’s Jeff Zucker’s characterization that Boxee was some sort of rogue piece of software, and that Hulu is in the right whenever it blocks access to the XBMC-derived media player. How about this: maybe Hulu is right to block Boxee? Let’s see where this takes us.

Boxee’s main contention is that, in watching Hulu, it’s no different than typing www.hulu.com into your Firefox or Internet Explorer address bar. To be slightly more accurate, it’d be like clicking on a bookmark: you don’t type in www.hulu.com when you load up Boxee, but click a UI element. So right there things are a little different.

Then there’s the interface. Compare Hulu in a “normal” Web browser with Hulu as seen through Boxee:

Normal

Boxee

That’s patently not the same interface (with a hat tip to Digital Society for doing the legwork and taking the screenshots). In Boxee, you’re whisked right away to a video without having to see the rest of the Hulu site. That doesn’t make the branding guys too happy (and throws dirt in the face of the guys who developed Hulu’s UI.)

Then there’s what I’m going to call the experience, for lack of a better term. TV studios may be happy to provide content to Hulu, but they know that the idea of sitting in front of a smallish laptop isn’t an ideal way to watch TV. It’s almost like they’re fine with providing content to a service that can never really replicate the “experience” of watching TV: sitting on a big, comfy couch in front of a 50-inch HDTV. With Boxee, you’re circumventing the inconvenience, so to speak, of watching on a clunky laptop by outputting the image, thanks to your Boxee box (in the future, of course; I know the box isn’t available now), onto your big TV, complete with Bluetooth remote control. You’ve essentially replicated the “normal” TV watching “experience,” which may not be what the studios signed up for in the first place. The ol’ switcheroo.

That said, yes, I know you can connect your laptop to your TV, and your audio output to a proper sound system—I did the very same thing for about a year, and it was great—but Hulu’s puppet-masters must know that the number of people who even know how to do that, and then who have the patience to string wires from here to there, are so small that it’s not worth complaining about.

But I can still see Boxee’s point-of-view. After all, when you watch Hulu videos in Boxee you’re still subjected to the very same ads as the Firefox people are; you’re not watching anything “for free,” as it were. The presentation may be different, but you’re still sitting through 30-second Ford commercials.

And to be even more fair to Boxee, they’ve essentially offered to diffuse the entire situation by coming to some sort of monetary agreement with Hulu that would make its users paying customers. (Boxee isn’t “above” making deals with content providers, nor should it be if it wants to be taken seriously as a “real” company, which is clearly its goal.) Let’s pick a number out of thin air: $5 per month to watch Hulu content via Boxee. Is that fair? I don’t know, it seems eminently reasonable, putting aside the fact that you’d partially be paying for over-the-air television, which is free, cable-based content notwithstanding. But then I’m sure Boxee users would complain that since they’re paying customers, why should they have to sit through advertisements anymore? But that’s an argument for another day.

All I’m trying to say is, I’m pretty sure I understand where Hulu and its backers are coming from vis-à-vis Boxee (and Plex, to be sure), but Boxee seems more than willing to find some sort of solution to this mess, if you can even call it that.

Thoughts? (I’ve already spent entirely too long thinking about this issue!)

Unannounced Core i7 Apple MacBook Pro surfaces in benchmarks logs - Apple Insider

UberGizmo (blog)

Unannounced Core i7 Apple MacBook Pro surfaces in benchmarks logs Apple Insider A benchmark report for an unreleased Apple MacBook Pro sporting Intel's upcoming dual-core 2.66GHz Core i7 mobile processor was published online this week, suggesting a refresh to the professional notebook line may be imminent. ... Core i7 MacBook Pro Benchmarks SurfaceI4U MacBook Pro with Core i7 M 620 benchmarkedGeekSmack Unreleased Core i7 MacBook Pro 6,1 Benchmarked? Supplies ConstrainedMac Rumors Daily Contributor -Electronista (blog) -SlashGear (blog) all 12 news articles »

Game Devs Migrating Toward iPhone, Away From Wii

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

comScore 2010 Super Bowl Pre-Game Survey Reveals Fan Predictions and Importance of Internet on Game Day

This Week in Geek: Killer Case Mods, Shape-shifting Gadgets, and Odd Speakers (PC World)

Die Antwoord's newfound Internet fame: your love don't pay my server bills

[Photo: Andy Davis for Mahala.]

If you missed this week's nuclear memesplosion of white trash Afrikaans zef-rap Next Level Shit with petite jailbait, Haring-esque wall art, and a Progeria survivor spiritual genius, here is the first BB post, and here is the second. Die Antwoord is the latest of many projects founded by Watkin Tudor Jones (aka "Waddy," aka "Ninja") and his classically-trained partner Yolandi Visser (aka "Yo-landi Vi$$er"). Today, Phillip de Wet of the South African newspaper The Daily Maverick emailed me,

Embarrassingly enough, you turned me onto these guys. As you did with plenty of other people. Does that make their next phase partially your creation? Anyway, that's why I thought I should point you to this piece we published a couple of minutes ago. It's partially a report on Die Antwoord's gig last night, and partially an examination on how their online fame doesn't mean much in the real world. Not yet, anyway. On behalf of many new fans, thanks for plucking them out of obscurity.

"Something fucking strange has fucking happened," Jones tells the crowd in Durbanville, explaining that the group's server (which hosts its entire upcoming album free for the listening) had served more than a terabyte of data in the previous two days. "If it was a Souf Efrican server I'd have to sell my father, sell my mother's house," he says, in reference to the high price of bandwidth in South Africa.

The group won't be bearing the cost of its sudden popularity; that is being taken care of by companies like Google. Its music videos are streamed by Google-owned YouTube, and most of the discussion about it happens on Facebook and Twitter or third-party blogs and news websites. Its own server is hosted in the USA, the land of milk and honey and bandwidth so cheap it's nearly free. Its demo CDs are created on a home computer at a price that can be measured in cents per unit, and even its very slick and highly stylised videos were made for next to nothing.

But neither is the group making any money out of the phenomenon. All its music is free for the taking and it has no merchandise to sell. It runs no advertising on its website, and doesn't get a cut of whatever revenues Facebook or Google generate. While millions of people were enjoying their music, they were splitting the door take at the house. At a couple of thousand rands a piece for a couple of hours work that is money many starving artists wouldn't sneer at, but it's hardly the big time.

Related: more coverage at Mahala. "Die fokken Antwoord is," and earlier, "15 Minutes with a NINJA" and "Max Doesn't Live Here Anymore." Images in this post courtesy of Mahala.

California’s CTO Responds To Our Challenge With His Own: Give CA Your Best IT Ideas

Editor’s note: In a pair of posts a couple of weeks ago, contributing columnist Vivek Wadhwa highlighted the antiquated nature of the state of California’s IT systems and the way contracts for those systems are doled out to legacy IT firms. He then challenged Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to come up with ways to rebuild California’s IT systems at one tenth the cost. California CTO P.K. Agarwal responds in this guest post with his own challenge: walk the talk and give him your best IT ideas. He’s even set up a crowdsourcing site to gather them.

Vivek, I’m glad to see you are challenging the readers of TechCrunch the same way you challenge the audiences of your speeches.

The debate that has erupted on TechCrunch in response to that challenge is particularly interesting to me because it focuses on a question that my colleagues and I have spent a lot of time trying to find an answer to: What’s the best way to migrate California’s legacy portfolio to new technologies? And there are many other related questions.

Like most governments in the US, California has a significant portfolio of legacy applications. Also like most governments, we are in the midst of converting many of these to newer technologies. Much of this migration work is being done in conjunction with our vendor partners, but we are always looking for more ways to get companies to work with us. Not just because we have an abstract appreciation of innovation, but because competition, between companies and ideas, produces better results for the state and its taxpayers. As a part of that shift, we are finding ways to ease the burden of doing business with the State. For instance, last year we made major strides in streamlining our procurement processes to make IT projects more timely and transparent.

We in Sacramento are not under the delusion that we have a monopoly on good ideas. We would like to channel the energy and enthusiasm of your readers to help us strengthen how we build and deploy IT in the State of California.

So how do we do this? I propose we engage in an online dialogue.

Since a good number of the readers of this blog are technically oriented, let’s “walk the talk” and use a crowdsourcing tool to get a consensus on the popular ideas. Using the link below, I encourage your readers to provide ideas, review and comment on other people’s ideas, and vote ideas up and down. As the tool aggregates our judgments, certain ideas will rise to the top. I would then take the top ranking ideas and further refine them through an interactive dialogue. This would not only be a valuable exercise for California, but hopefully a rewarding activity for your readers.

So please take a look at http://ca_it.ideascale.com and give us your best ideas.

Walt Mossberg, David Carr And Michael Arrington Talk iPad With Charlie Rose

Charlie Rose had The Wall Street Journal/All Things D’s Walt Mossberg, The New York Times’ David Carr and our own Michael Arrington on his show Thursday night to talk about the Apple iPad. You can also view the video on the Charlie Rose website, here. This was Mike’s sixth time on Charlie Rose.

Conan Who? NBC Disappears "The Tonight Show" From the Web. [MediaMemo]

Remember the whole Conan O’Brien/Jay Leno imbroglio from last month? Perhaps NBC wishes you didn’t. The GE (GE) unit has removed every episode of the show’s seven-month run from its NBC.com site, as well as Hulu, the site NBC owns with News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and Disney’s (DIS) ABC.

A little odd, given that a couple of days ago, the network was offering every single “Tonight Show” episode O’Brien had taped on NBC.com. But then again, everything about this story has been odd. NBC declined to comment.

NBC–at least, I’m assuming it’s NBC–has also been aggressive about taking down Conan episodes from Google’s (GOOG) YouTube. So here’s a legally sanctioned clip from CBS (CBS) employee David Letterman discussing the whole affair:

BOOM! Top Apple news for the week of 1-31-2010

Section:

We may not cover Apple 24x7… but we know someone who does!  Here’s a few of this week’s hottest from Appletell to get you started…

• What the iPad is missing
• Appletell reviews XO Skin for the iPhone 3G
• Appletell reviews Camera Plus Pro and POV for iPhone
• iPad Keynote condensed to 3 minutes; full of great, awesome, and beautiful
• Apple awarded touch sensitive bezel patent

Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

Tebow Facebook Effort Explodes to More Than 200,000 Supporters

Your Comments Are Safe With Us

About half an hour ago, a post that was published on the Digital Inspiration blog hit Techmeme. The title of that post left little to the imagination: it read “TechCrunch Removes Reader Comments From All Older Blog Posts”.

That allegation in itself is inaccurate, as is most of the rest of the article, so I felt compelled to respond quickly and offer our side of the story. Which, on a sidenote, we weren’t asked for by the person or people behind the blog (at least not to my knowledge).

I’ll start with the part that checks out: yes, comments on older blog posts are not being displayed at the moment, although they are still stored in the database on our side. But no, we did not remove them because we were looking to decrease our page load time – although we’re constantly looking for ways to do so – and there’s no big search engine optimization conspiracy behind it either.

This also has nothing to do with the fact that we actively moderate comments on posts around here – we’ve always welcomed civil discussion and that hasn’t changed. Criticism and disagreement is fine, but we want to keep the comment section a nice place to come for everyone, and those who keep that from happening – spammers, anonymous trolls directing personal attacks, etc. – will see their comments occasionally get moderated out of sight (read: deleted).

So why are comments on older blog posts not being displayed?

The simple truth is that this is a direct consequence of the widely reported incident that occurred in late January, when we were maliciously hacked.

Since then, our technical staff has been hard at work not only plugging the hole but also making sure there are no other security issues that can be exploited, as well as taking the necessary precautions for such an event not to occur again.

Truth be told, I have no in depth knowledge of what happened precisely when we were hacked, nor do I have any detailed information about what measures we are taking as a result of the security breach. We’ve always been very transparent about the way things are run here at TechCrunch, so I expect that when and if our technical staff feel it is safe to share that information, we will all learn more about it.

Here’s what I do know, though: no comments that were previously on older posts have been voluntarily deleted by anyone here at TechCrunch, and all that were published in the past will be reinstated soon. This is a technical issue.

Your comments are truly valuable to us, they are safely stored, and they will be restored in the near future.

Any questions or comments?

Does Monster’s Acquisition Of Yahoo! HotJobs Matter If The Internet Is The Job Board?

(Editor’s note: Centralized Web job boards are in decline. Dan Finnigan, CEO of Jobvite, explains why in this guest post. Previously, he was Senior VP at Yahoo and GM of HotJobs, and before that a Director on CareerBuilder’s Board as CEO of Knight Ridder Digital.

Monster’s acquisition of Yahoo HotJobs signals a significant landscape change for a job board industry facing significant economic pressure and I believe the deal also marks a “new normal” in how companies are hiring talent. Online recruiting is transitioning away from “the Big Three” job boards. The Internet is becoming the job board.

Of course, unloading and closing properties that are not part of Yahoo’s strategy going forward is smart. (Though selling a job advertising board smack in the middle of this downturn and extreme unemployment must have been as hard as selling an empty, foreclosed home in Las Vegas right now.)

But more importantly, this acquisition is an indicator of a rapid evolution as more hiring takes place online. Venture-backed startups are transforming this industry as new technologies begin to change how companies find and attract talent.  The elephant in the room is that the economic jolt of September 2008 has permanently altered the job market and dramatically accelerated labor trends underway for many years, such as the growth in job turnover throughout a person’s career.

Increases in unemployment, under-employment and turnover are boosting traffic to nearly all job boards and job search engines – and the number of online applications to resource-depleted recruiting departments. Companies are spending more money sifting through unqualified applications, so they are naturally spending less on job boards and taking advantage of free sites, like Indeed, to post and distribute their jobs.

To combat the influx of poor-fit applications, companies are turning to new technologies and online services to target talent and search across the open Web for people who may not be actively searching for a job on a board. This is possible because 42% of working adults in the US now maintain a profile somewhere online—most notably on LinkedIn and Facebook, but also on Twitter and services like Jigsaw, an SF-based, user-generated database of professionals. And the downturn is growing this number.

The more innovative recruiters at growing companies like Zappos and Dell are now are using social media to engage prospective candidates in a genuine and inexpensive way: building candidate communities in their career site and blogs, search engine optimizing job listings, distributing jobs through social networks to dramatically drive referrals, and tracking web analytics by job to determine their best sources of talent.

To me, the more interesting acquisition was Monster’s purchase 18 months ago of Trovix, a Bay Area startup that built a behavioral algorithm for matching jobs and resumes to help recruiters sift through applicants and jobseekers through jobs. But, the irony is that they will be “unveiling” this new technology, dubbed 6Sense, on this weekend’s (expensive) Super Bowl, the annual marketing battleground of the big, horizontal job boards.

As funny as those ads can be, they are not likely to solve the job boards’ bigger marketing challenge: how to convince companies to spend more money “posting and praying” that the best person applies for their job when the broader, open Internet is fast becoming the new, cost-effective “job board” of talent.  This week’s combination of Monster and Hotjobs isn’t going to solve that problem either.

Image via Flickr/Frank Gruber.

Weekend Giveaway: Baby it’s cold out there

Hey, friend. Want a soft shell jacket from the inimitable ScottEVest? These guys are really and truly our favorite outerwear makers – I wear my SeVs every day – and they want to give you one jacket, whether you deserve it or not.

The jacket (this link might not work as they were just hit by a phishing attack but they’re totally legit) has 19 pockets and is made of 3 layer fabric. It is even compatible with the iPad, if you can believe it. How do you win? I’ll tell you.

That’s actually Scott himself who, at his age, probably shouldn’t be drinking full sugar Coke but whatevs. To win just comment on how ruddy and handsome he looks in his jacket and I’ll pick one winner on Monday.

Update: Comments appear to be broken right now, so let’s make it easy – just send an email to contest@crunchgear.com with the subject line “SEV”. That’ll get you entered to win. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Freaky beautiful arm-warmers

Ginga Squid: ....and more Arm Warmers with Sewn-On Beaded Jewelry (Thanks, Vicky!)


Source: Boing Boing | 6 Feb 2010 | 8:30 am

Man vs. Zombies: Telling a tale through Twitter

FROM GAMERTELL - Man vs. Zombies, is the first Twitter account to be dedicated to producing an ongoing story through twitter updates.
MORE »

Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

Saturday Morning Science Experiment: Practicing safe earthquake

Two models of a 12-story building are tested on a shake table. The one on the right is supported by a base isolation system, which effectively puts a shock-absorbing barrier between the building's foundation and potentially shaky ground. In fact, during the tests, which took place in 2007, this particular base isolation system, called Earthquake Protector, turned out to be many times more effective than any other system then known.

There are three trials on the video. Watch it through to the end for the final fall.

Learn more at the Network for Earthquake Engineering

Dropbox, a file sharing app, coming to an Android phone near you

Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Web, Web Apps

There are many services available that allow users to share files over the Internet, such as documents, photos, videos, and music.  These services become much more efficient and popular if they create an app to be used on smartphones such as the iPhone, Palm webOS, BlackBerry, or Android phones.  Well, Dropbox has recently announced in an email that a Dropbox app will become available for Android and BlackBerry soon. 

The email wasn’t really specific as to a time the app would become available.  But the fact that it is coming is sure to make paid and free users happy.  Basically, you upload whatever media you want to your own account and give away a link that can be used to download it.  The app on an Android or BlackBerry phone makes sharing media files that much simpler and effective.  Currently, a SugarSync app is available on the Android market, which is similar to Dropbox.  Both services allow free accounts to use 2GB of online space, and paid accounts receive higher storage. 

Via [Androinica]

Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

Google Earth Update Allows Peek Into The Past

New copies of Tony Hawk Ride appear at Goodwill Store

FROM GAMERTELL - Factory sealed copies of Tony Hawk Ride for the Wii, which include the game and skateboard peripheral, were discovered at an Illinois Goodwill store for $74.99 each.
MORE »

Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

Kazaa Takes A Swing At Symantec After Adware Accusations

The history of P2P file sharing service Kazaa (which actually started life as “KaZaA”) is known to most of us born in the eighties or before, and consists mainly of copyright related lawsuits and adware-ridden software.

The gist of the story can be found on its Wikipedia profile, but what many seem to forget in present times is that the service is still around, serving users an unlimited amount of (licensed) songs for a $20 monthly subscription fee.

Recently, a Symantec security program apparently identified the Kazaa desktop client as high-risk, flagging the software as adware. This prompted Brilliant Digital Entertainment, the company that operates Kazaa, to issue a special notice / consumer alert to its customers.

And it isn’t pulling any punches.

While boasting about the fact that Kazaa is now a legitimate business offering over one million fully licensed tracks to its customers, Kazaa claims Symantec for the second time in recent weeks incorrectly identified it as being high risk. As a result, the company says, a subset of users were unable to use Kazaa because Symantec’s security software flagged it as adware. Some of its users were apparently “sufficiently spooked by Symantec’s unilateral action” after those warnings that they followed its advice to remove Kazaa.

In an angered statement, the company adds:

Symantec had justified turning off the music for some of Kazaa customers by flagging files in the Kazaa music plug-in application as high risk due to the files being used for serving advertisements. As a result Kazaa customers or subscribers running Norton AV are having these files stripped from the application which prevents them from using the service.

It continues:

Symantec’s error, hot on the heels of a similar mistake against Spotify, highlights the potential for anti-virus companies to do more harm than good in the effort to displace pirate operations from the on-line marketplace.

After the Spotify incident (Symantec classified the music streaming service as a Trojan about a week ago), the security software company apologized on Twitter. It’ll be interesting to see how they handle this notice from Kazaa.

Boy Soldier, 14, UK's Youngest WWII Death