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The Joy of Tech on the iPad
Source: CrunchGear | 13 Mar 2010 | 2:06 am Malware Authors Learn Market Segmentation From the BestEarthquake Retrofit writes "The Register has a rather funny story about the Zeus botnet: 'The latest version of the Zeus do-it-yourself crimeware kit goes to great lengths to thwart would-be pirates by introducing a hardware-based product activation scheme similar to what's found in Microsoft Windows. ... They've also pushed out multiple flavors of the package that vary in price depending on the capabilities it offers. Just as Windows users can choose between the lower-priced Windows 7 Starter or the more costly Windows 7 Business, bot masters have multiple options for Zeus.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 13 Mar 2010 | 1:52 am Ford introduces patrol car to replace Crown Victoria - Detroit Free Press
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 13 Mar 2010 | 1:06 am Star Predicted to Blast Through the Solar SystemIn 1.5 million years time a star called Gliese 710 has a high chance of colliding with the Oort Cloud, potentially causing mayhem on Earth.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 13 Mar 2010 | 12:40 am Licensing an Abandonware Game?WolverineOfLove writes "I'm recreating a 1980s abandonware game with copyrights that have been seemingly unused for the past 18 years. The situation is detailed further in a Slashdot journal entry I just wrote, but in short: Is it worth dealing with all the copyrights and paying money if I want to recreate an abandonware title as an open source game? I know there are legal implications to certain decisions I might make, but there is a real possibility that this game's copyright holder will do nothing with the rights, and I'd much prefer preserving it for others than letting it fade away."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 13 Mar 2010 | 12:37 am Leaked UK record industry memo sets out plans for breaking UK copyright
In this leaked, six-page email, Richard Mollet, the Director of Public Affairs for the British Phonographic Institute (the UK's record-industry lobbyists), sets out the BPI's strategy for ramming through the Digital Economy Bill, a sweeping, backwards reform to UK copyright law that will further sacrifice privacy and due process in the name of preserving copyright, without actually preserving copyright.
Mollet's memo, entitled "Digital Economy Bill weekly update 11 March 2010," appears to be a weekly status report on the DEB's progress. On the CC list are executives from major record labels, staff at IFPI (the international record industry lobby), PR agents from The Open Road, and others I don't recognise (if you can identify others on the CC list, please post to the comments). In the memo, Mollet identifies Britain's top spies as being a stumbling block to the bill's passage -- worried, apparently, that creating a Great Firewall of Britain will make it harder for spies to spy on naughty sites (someone should tell MI5 about Ipredator, the excellent proxy service from the Pirate Bay; after all, that's the same proxy that everyone else in Britain is likely to use to get at the blocked sites if the BPI gets its way). Mollet also implies that Britain's spy agencies might have paid for a Talk Talk survey in which 71% of 18-34 year olds said that they would simply evade the DEB and go on infringing. Mollet claims that Britain's ISPs have already caved into their duties to spy on and censor network connections, claiming that there is a sense of "settled will" in the "ISP community." On the other hand, he identifies Members of Parliament as being "resigned" to the fact that they will not be allowed to debate the bill or give it "detailed scrutiny" (heck of a job, MPs!). He cites an expert on legislation as saying that the bill will likely die if MPs insist on their right and responsibility to examine this legislation in detail before voting on it. BPI Digital Economy Bill weekly minutes (PDF)
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Source: Boing Boing | 13 Mar 2010 | 12:13 am Leaked UK record industry memo sets out plans for breaking UK copyrightIn this leaked, six-page email, Richard Mollet, the Director of Public Affairs for the British Phonographic Institute (the UK's record-industry lobbyists), sets out the BPI's strategy for ramming through...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 13 Mar 2010 | 12:13 am FCC to propose 10-year Internet expansion: report (Reuters)Reuters - The Federal Communications Commission will submit a 10-year plan to Congress on Tuesday that would establish high-speed Internet as the country's dominant means of communication, The New York Times reported in Saturday editions.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 13 Mar 2010 | 12:13 am Boba Fett accordion-busks the Zelda theme on a NYC subway platformSweet busking pitch: Boba Fett costume, accordion, Zelda theme. This is what makes the NYC subway great. Boba Fett shows off his artistic side (via Digg)
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Source: Boing Boing | 12 Mar 2010 | 11:44 pm Boba Fett accordion-busks the Zelda theme on a NYC subway platformSweet busking pitch: Boba Fett costume, accordion, Zelda theme. This is what makes the NYC subway great. Boba Fett shows off his artistic side (via Digg) Previously:Dead Plants: kick-ass shoutin' hillbilly...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Mar 2010 | 11:44 pm Luc Besson's steampunk movieHere's the latest trailer for Luc Besson's forthcoming steampunk movie, "Les Aventures Extraordinaires d'Adele Blanc-Sec." That's some heady stuff.
Les Aventures Extraordinaires d'Adele Blanc-Sec - 2nd teaser
(Thanks, Xeni!)
Luc Besson's steampunk movieHere's the latest trailer for Luc Besson's forthcoming steampunk movie, "Les Aventures Extraordinaires d'Adele Blanc-Sec." That's some heady stuff. Les Aventures Extraordinaires d'Adele Blanc-Sec -...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Mar 2010 | 11:40 pm Sci-fi: a Jesusfish raygun parodyLooking for an automobile decor element that proudly proclaims your devotion to the earliest, persecuted science fiction fans who huddled in catacombs, scratching crude rayguns into the walls? Look...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Mar 2010 | 11:31 pm Sci-fi: a Jesusfish raygun parody
Looking for an automobile decor element that proudly proclaims your devotion to the earliest, persecuted science fiction fans who huddled in catacombs, scratching crude rayguns into the walls?
Look no further.
WHITE vinyl SCI-FI RAY GUN decal jesus fish parody 3x5
(Thanks, Travis!)
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Source: Boing Boing | 12 Mar 2010 | 11:31 pm Hugo nominating deadline loomsKate from Aussiecon, the upcoming World Science Fiction convention in Melbourne, sez, "The deadline for sending in your Hugo Awards nomination ballot is fast approaching! The Hugo Awards are awards for...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Mar 2010 | 11:22 pm Hugo nominating deadline loomsKate from Aussiecon, the upcoming World Science Fiction convention in Melbourne, sez, "The deadline for sending in your Hugo Awards nomination ballot is fast approaching! The Hugo Awards are awards for excellence in the field of science fiction and fantasy. The nomination deadline is Saturday, March 13, 2010 23:59 PST. To submit a ballot you must either be a member of Anticipation, the 2009 Worldcon, or have registered for Aussiecon 4, the 2010 Worldcon, by January 31st." For the record, my novel Makers is eligible for nomination.Source: Boing Boing | 12 Mar 2010 | 11:22 pm US census infographics from 1870 The census is one of America's great institutions, the way the country knows itself. Here then is the 1870 statistical atlas of the ninth census, scanned at high rez. Your one-stop shop for 1870's best infographics: "Presented here are all of the maps and charts from the first statistical atlas of the US Census, widely praised in its time and still a wonderful example of sophisticated graphics, the out-of-date racial/psychological nomenclature notwithstanding. The atlas is available page-by-page from the Library of Congress, but you can download it in bulk here." STATISTICAL ATLAS OF THE NINTH CENSUS (1870) (Thanks, Marilyn!)
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Source: Boing Boing | 12 Mar 2010 | 11:21 pm US census infographics from 1870The census is one of America's great institutions, the way the country knows itself. Here then is the 1870 statistical atlas of the ninth census, scanned at high rez. Your one-stop shop for 1870's best...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Mar 2010 | 11:21 pm Die Antwoord to sign with Interscope, Neill Blomkamp to direct next video
Photos: Xeni Jardin (top) and Sean Bonner The South African rap-rave internet star known as The Ninja grabs my face by the cheeks. He leans forward and stares into my eyes, like a large savannah predator about to inhale a hamster. "And that's what I did to Jimmy Iovine," he says. "He didn't seem to like it, but nobody told me it wasn't cool to do that. And then I kissed him on each cheek, because we were making a deal like you do with the mafia. Die Antwoord is in business with Interscope now." It's been just over a month since a friend emailed me a link to their music, and I blogged here on Boing Boing. They had fans before, but what exploded in these past four weeks is the stuff labels and artists dream of: Die Antwoord became a living meme of unprecedented velocity, propelled into global megawebstardom faster than any act I've ever seen. Ninja tells me that in addition to shaking hands with Interscope, District 9 helmer Neill Blomkamp plans to direct Antwoord's next music video, they'll likely be performing at the Coachella festival, and a film is in the works.
"I don't understand how it happened any more than they do, but I understand how rare it is," he says. And he's right: labels spend millions of dollars trying to create what happened to them.
"The funniest thing has been the people on the internet angry that we were 'fake.' The only people who thought we were some kind of hoax were from the US and the EU. This is just real, it's who we are." Ninja and Yolandi have long been fans of photographer (and onetime geology student) Roger Ballen, best known for his disturbing black and white portraits of South African mining town residents. When fame hit, they emailed their idol, and he agreed to shoot the $O$ album cover.
He cites other influences as diverse as William Gibson's novel Neuromancer, the rapper Eminem, science fiction movies, and the toy company Friends With You. I ask about Leon Botha, an enigmatic figure who appears in some of the band's videos—Botha is 24, and has Progeria, a disease that often takes the lives of its victims at a far earlier age.
"When you're hanging around him, it's like you're hearing the voice of God, he's so present and immediate," he says. "He's a beautiful soul," I say. We've swapped a few emails, and I was mesmerized by Botha's YouTube video monologues.
I remind him of the day Die Antwoord burst into dominance on Google Trends: February 3rd, 2010, some 48 hours after that first Boing Boing post. "February 3rd was already a date I remembered," he replies. "My younger brother, his nickname was 'Boo,' he committed suicide 7 years ago on that day." "This the only thing I can do, I can't do anything else," he continues. "It is what I love, and all I have ever wanted to do in my life. Now that all of this—" (he gestures toward Hollywood Boulevard, as a truck carrying leftover Academy Awards props cruises by) "—now that this is happening to us, it's overwhelming because you also realize that it could disappear right away. " "I don't know what that's going to mean. But for now, I just know that we have a film to make, and albums to record, and shows to play." "It's not bad." # # #
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Source: Boing Boing | 12 Mar 2010 | 11:18 pm Die Antwoord to sign with Interscope, Neill Blomkamp to direct next videoPhotos: Xeni Jardin (top) and Sean Bonner The South African rap-rave internet star known as The Ninja grabs my face by the cheeks. He leans forward and stares into my eyes, like a large savannah predator...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Mar 2010 | 11:18 pm Apple Loses Aussie Trademark Complaint Over "i" NameCuteSteveJobs writes "Apple has been dealt a severe blow having been told that it no longer has a monopoly on the letter 'i' for product naming. IP Australia, the government body that oversees trademark applications, rejected Apples' complaint against a company selling 'DOPi' laptop bags. Last year Australian computer company Macpro Computers claimed that after 26 years of flying its own Macpro brand that Apple was 'trying to burn us out' with legal fees. This was after Apple released its own Macpro line 3½ years ago. Apple lost that complaint, but is appealing. Last year Apple went after supermarket Woolworths complaining their new logo which featured a 'W' fashioned into the shape of an apple. (Woolworths sells real apples.)"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 12 Mar 2010 | 10:50 pm MySpace’s Mid Level Management Structure Is Crumbling
Three star senior employees left to go to cross-town startup Gravity, we reported earlier this week. And tonight we’ve heard that Jeff Webber, the engineering director that oversees the email, instant messaging and other “communications” platforms for MySpace, resigned earlier this week as well to join a startup. He’s been at MySpace for nearly three years and was one of the star engineers and leaders, says one source. Other recent departures – VP and General Manager of Mobile John Faith, SVP User Experience Katie Geminder and most of her team. And of course CEO Owen Van Natta. And lots more as well, only a few of which we’ve reported. The company has no direction, says everyone we talk to at MySpace except the top execs, and internal politics are the only thing that seem to matter. Ambitious new projects like Remaking MySpace have been thrown away just because the wrong exec supported it. Anyone who actually wants to build products has left or is looking for a new job, say many, many sources. If you’re a MySpace employee and feel differently, please contact us anonymously. Because right now all we see is a ton of fluff and absurdity coming from the top, and massive morale problems at the middle management ranks. The title of this post is actually a recent quote from a (now former) MySpace employee, and it seems to be accurate. They say a company has to hit rock bottom before it can even think about rebuilding into something new. If that’s the case, the time to start rebuilding is, apparently, right about now. But in our opinion MySpace has no chance at all until it is free of the News Corp. death grip. Information provided by CrunchBase      
Source: TechCrunch | 12 Mar 2010 | 10:32 pm JPL Background Check Case Reaches Supreme CourtDthief writes "A long-running legal battle between the United States government and a group of 29 scientists and engineers of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, has now reached the US Supreme Court." At issue: mandatory background checks for scientists and engineers working at JPL, which they allege includes snooping into their sexual orientation, as well as their mental and physical health.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Gizmodo | 12 Mar 2010 | 8:40 pm Pre-orders brisk for Apple's new iPad - Washington Post
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 12 Mar 2010 | 8:30 pm Leading California Security Firm Adds Business Security Management to its OfferingsSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 12 Mar 2010 | 8:22 pm Chatroulette Dude: I Don't Want to Sell. But I'd Like Google To Pay. [MediaMemo]
Ternovskiy is visiting the US and flirting with investors, and you can see why they’d want to talk to him. The 17-year-old spent three days in his bedroom building the site, named it after “The Deer Hunter”, and now it attracts more than 30 million visitors a month. He’s also savvy enough to tell everyone that he’s perfectly happy to go it alone. Though it would be easier for him to do that if Google (GOOG) would send him a check. He says the search giant won’t pay him his AdWords money because he’s too young.
You should read the whole thing, which doubles as a very nice metaphor for the Web 2.0 era. Which turns out not to have disappeared, after all. You can now launch a Web service that attracts millions of users without having to leave your parents’ house. But if words aren’t your thing, here’s that excellent Jon Stewart clip again.
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 Telegraph.co.uk | @ScrewYouSXSW vents at absent husband CNET A hilarious Twitter feed purporting to be by a woman whose husband left her behind on their anniversary weekend as he went to SXSW is getting laughs all around Austin this week. AUSTIN, Texas--What's the phrase? ... Tech companies try to stand out at SXSW in Austin Geo-location apps to star at South by Southwest SXSW gets underway |
How many e-book readers do you think are out there right now for you to choose from? If you did a little digging, I bet you’d find 50 or so. Maybe 10 really worth checking out. But right now is a bit of a weird period in e-reader history. The Kindle cemented e-readers in the consumer headspace, catapulting them from weirdo alternative technology to mainstream gadget. That’s what the iPad threatens to do with tablets — we’ll see about that. But the Kindle and the iPad are two important forces in the current e-reader wars; the question, upon the answer of which depends the success of many a device, is whether “bonus” features like second screens and weird form factors in e-readers will be enough to differentiate them from the high-profile devices pressing them on both flanks?
Take a second to imagine it as a battle between three armies. On one side of the field is the steadfast Kindle Corps, seasoned and numerous. On the other is the glorious Apple Brigade, untried in e-reader combat but veteran of other battles. In between them is a menagerie of Sony, Asus, and miscellaneous independent mercenaries, bristling with foreign and barbaric weapons, gathering together only because they don’t stand a chance by themselves. In real life, they are not gathered at all, but that doesn’t work with the metaphor. Maybe they have a non-aggression pact or something, I don’t know. Regardless, the battle is about to begin.
See, the vast majority of e-readers were designed as a response to the Kindle, not to tablet computers, which may or may not obsolete e-readers altogether. It’s a bad situation: the whole time you’re improving your competitor’s product, someone else is skipping your entire device class on the grounds that it will be made ridiculous by their awesome gadget. Some of the special features developed to combat the Kindle will stay, and some won’t live to see their own first birthday.
Personally, I think e-readers will stick around next to tablet computers, since it’s just as much of a problem for a device to do too much as it is for it to do too little. You may not want your e-mail and browsing device to be the same as your reading device. And of course the Kindle isn’t the end of all readers: the generation currently being released has among its members a few interesting features… and a few duds. Let’s take a look.
The nook is what people think of when this type of e-reader is brought up, and for good reason. It’s a sexy little bugger. Now, compare it to its rivals: the upcoming Spring Design Alex and the Entourage Edge. What do you see? A larger secondary screen. Better, right? Unfortunately, the secondary screen does two things that pretty much sabotage the idea.
First, it takes away from the readable area (the main screen); 90% of the time you are using an e-reader, you are reading. That is the device’s stated purpose. When you put in a secondary screen, you are subtracting from the functional part of your device. I think it’s an unstated but obvious goal of design that your device should primarily do what it does.
Second, it implies uselessness on the part of the e-ink screen for UI stuff, and suggests to the consumer “If you want to do stuff other than read e-books, you’re better off with a device that’s all secondary screen.” It’s like admitting a strike against your product before the consumer even sees it. Bad idea.
Not to mention having a color LCD screen raises the cost of the device considerably. It is for these reasons that I think the secondary screen is a one-generation fluke, not likely to be seen again after 2010.
There actually aren’t many that fall under this category, but they are on their way, and I believe this is something that will stick around. Depending on the technology used (Mirasol, pigment pores), there may be no downside to having a color screen other than cost. That is to say that reflectivity, weight, responsiveness, contrast, and resolution will remain the same, except now you have color (however washed out in these first devices).
As I said, there are practically none of these devices on the market right now. Asus has an OLED-based one it wants to push, but at six inches it’s not very tempting, and of course it’ll be expensive. And it’s more of a tablet anyway, so it gets ignored. But you can bet that Amazon, Sony, and every other company is pushing display R&D like none other trying to get color e-ink to work for a decent price. We’ll probably have a few announcements this year, but no products until next CES.
On the other hand, we already have Pixel Qi, which may beg the question of color e-ink before the latter is even viable. On that front, we have the popular Notion Ink Adam, demoed here, which is one of the few devices which genuinely falls under both the e-reader and tablet categories. Personally I’m bullish about it, though I’m afraid it may crumple under the combined pressure of Amazon and Apple, both of which will be gunning for it.
At any rate, color is here to stay. Whether it’s an unexploited e-ink technology or a hybrid like Pixel Qi, you better believe that color will huge in the next year. Not only does it open up capability for running some applications, but it also lets the device and creator tap into the huge academic book market, which needs color. Believe me, I wouldn’t have passed my Neuroanatomy classes with a black and white textbook.
Are you kidding me? Almost every interactive device in the world is going to be touchable by the end of 2010. Any e-readers that don’t have this feature by the holidays are going to be laughed at long and hard. Touchscreens you can write on are going to be key as well; if your e-reader can replace the “back of the napkin” sketches, diagrams, and calculations you do already, then hell, why not?
The Entourage Edge needs another mention here, since it has that book-like format, but as I noted before, that actually ends up being a weakness. You’re splitting your functionality and essentially the user can only use half the device at any given time, and is all the while thinking “Man, I wish the other half of this thing didn’t exist right now.” The Courier, which obviously is not e-reader but tablet, solves this by having both sides active at all times. Not possible for the Edge.
Here’s a tough one: the Samsung E6. Its slider form factor reminds one of their slider phones — this thing in particular. But there are plenty of objections here. You see it and immediately think, “an e-reader with moving parts? No thanks.” I mean really, simplicity is key with a device that’s meant to replace a paperback. And anyone will be able to tell you’re doing something wrong when you need a whole huge sliding mechanism just to reveal a D-pad and a couple buttons that could easily have been put where the Samsung logo is. And the speakers are on it too! What the hell, guys? Well, we can all agree that the E6 is going to sell about three units. I think sliders are out.
But what about a sliding QWERTY keyboard? I haven’t seen one of those yet, but I’m afraid it might have the same issues as the E6. Besides, better displays means better on-screen keyboards. These things aren’t meant for typing anyway. Leave it to tablet computers to figure this out.
What about ultra-slim? Hey, why not? My favorite e-book reader out there is the Plastic Logic Que, for no other reason than that it’s slim and handsome, just like me. Seriously though, a touchscreen (however primitive) and a thin, refined design will sell against the most robust competitors, and the Que is refined as all hell (though sadly, delayed). If someone really and truly just wants to read books and magazines on an e-ink screen, they don’t want or need anything else, but they do care whether it looks like they’re reading a gigantic BlackBerry or not. Slim, buttonless designs will stay. You can be sure the next Kindle will have one (though will likely keep its signature side buttons).
Flexibility? The Skiff is working at this, and it’s something e-ink and (kind of) OLEDs are uniquely capable of at the moment, but I get the feeling it’s going to end up on the low-end devices. See, as long as a consumer is paying $400 or so for a device like this, I think that for the time being, they are going to want build quality that suggests that. They want glass, metal, rigidity, sturdiness, all that. Until you can actually roll or fold up your e-reader, I don’t see this being a big selling point. But don’t count it out completely; this feature isn’t dead, it’s just sleeping.
Another tough one. I don’t have a problem with Android on e-readers — it adds a little credibility somehow, and I’m sure there are going to be a few apps (if there aren’t already) that are meant to run only on e-readers, for customizing this or that, or finding free books. If Android is to be the de facto OS of e-readers, so be it. I feel that Chrome OS will be too much for an e-reader, so it doesn’t pose a threat, nor any of the other mobile or free OSes. They could just as easily run a different Linux-based OS, but Android has name recognition and probably some handy 3G and mobile wi-fi stacks.
There is the issue, however, that in some devices Android does more to show what the device is not capable of that what it is. Look at this little thing from Gigabyte. The OS looks completely out of place there, and is a mess to navigate.
As for Apps in general, well, I think we’ll see a basic stable of apps develop — things that are applicable to e-ink screens, probably features that the creators should have included. Most e-readers don’t have the kind of displays or usage patterns as other Android devices, so lots of the Marketplace will be pointless. And as for other apps, I guarantee anything worth getting will be integrated into the second generation of the reader as a native function. Color screens and better responsiveness might change this (as would a Pixel Qi rout) but for now I’m saying Apps aren’t going to win any battles. Besides, Apple’s got them licked there.
It should be noted that there are plenty of perfectly nice-looking e-book readers out there that are not “special” in any way. Look at this Asus one. Doesn’t it look nice? Yes. But the competition will bury it unless it’s stupid cheap. The Kindle clones will disappear because the vanilla Kindle form factor and feature set will start to show its age to casual consumers this year, especially as alternative and open book stores begin to proliferate (options!) and alternative e-readers penetrate the collective attention bubble. And of course you can expect a totally new device from Amazon this year as well, though they got a bit of a late start.
And what will be the effect of the iPad on all this? I don’t want to say much on this, because there’s still a lot to be learned about that device. I said earlier that e-readers will exist alongside tablets for some time, and I stand by that. If people really like to read books on a device of this form factor, I doubt the iPad (or similar devices) will be their only device.
Personally, I’m sticking with books, and looking forward to tablets as a way to read newspapers and magazines, which obviously require color and a net connection, neither of which is a guarantee with the current or impending generation of e-readers. I’ll be interested to see how my predictions fare against reality, but I think I’m on solid ground with most of them.
French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment (Thanks, Steve and everyone else who suggested this!)One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes. An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: "I am a plane", before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets...
Scientists at Fort Detrick told him that agents had sprayed LSD into the air and also contaminated "local foot products".
Mr Albarelli said the real "smoking gun" was a White House document sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission formed in 1975 to investigate CIA abuses. It contained the names of a number of French nationals who had been secretly employed by the CIA and made direct reference to the "Pont St. Esprit incident." In its quest to research LSD as an offensive weapon, Mr Albarelli claims, the US army also drugged over 5,700 unwitting American servicemen between 1953 and 1965.
(Image: Shaw's French Bread, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Adam Pieniazek's photostream)
 Christian Science Monitor | FCC Plan to Widen Internet Access in US Sets Up Battle New York Times The Federal Communications Commission is proposing an ambitious 10-year plan that will reimagine the nation's media and technology priorities by establishing high-speed Internet as the country's dominant communication ... US FCC releases Internet speed test tool FCC chairman outlines broadband plan for kids FCC to propose 10-year Internet expansion |
I received the Entourage eDGe review unit the other day, and have been playing with it quite a bit. A full review is coming soon, but suffice to say that I like what I’ve seen so far. Here are a handful of photos to whet your appetite for my forthcoming review!
Question: why doesn’t this thing exist? I’m reviewing projectors the size of decks of cards, and my phone has turn-by-turn GPS navigation, but I still need to use a full-size AV receiver when I need to plug my SNES into my home stereo? I was wondering about this, and just doodled up this little thing here. It seems like for less than $100, a little gadget like this, probably about the size of a paperback, should be able to instantly convert any input stream to another. Why do I need a separate adapter for every single kind of connection?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but nothing really exists out there for this purpose except for:
Sure, the first doesn’t require power and the second is an integral part of any home AV system, but… really, there’s nothing in between?
In a day and age where all our devices have different inputs and outputs, we don’t have a universal, battery-or-USB powered gizmo that just takes whatever you put into it, detects what you’ve plugged in the other end, and outputs in that format. There might be a little upscaling if you’re going from RCA to HDMI, but a little dedicated graphics chip would make short work of that, and really, nobody cares about quality with an old-school analog input like that. You could have a couple models with a variety of inputs and outputs. Analog to digital, studio specialty, that kind of thing.
Seriously, you put a little low-power processor in there, it runs a simple BIOS that simply hears the input and puts out the output. The components have to be cheap enough that it’d be peanuts to build, and a 3000mAh battery should make it last at least four or five hours — enough to watch a movie or power a party where the speakers need a digital input or something.
I mean, I’ll totally take it back if there’s something practical out there for this purpose, but to my meager knowledge there isn’t. Maybe every store sells ‘em and I just don’t know it. Don’t you guys think this would be useful to have around?
Section: Web, Online Music/Video
Slacker Radio, one of the many online and mobile options for radio, is rumored to be adding on-demand music playback to their service. The Pandora, Last.fm, and let’s not forget regular radio competitor will soon be taking on a whole new force in Rhapsody, Spotify, and Napster by allowing users to choose what songs they want to play, when they want to play them.
Slacker Radio has almost been cast in a shadow by the wildly popular Pandora and even Last.fm. But users will actually be stunned to find that they have more playback control than Pandora provides, including the ability to request a specific song to play down the line. With the addition of an On-Demand subscription service, Slacker will become a one-stop shop for music playback on the web.
However, this does not come without backlash. On-demand music has had a tough time bringing in profit as unlimited music streaming is not greeted enthusiastically by record labels. Rhapsody and Napster both allow 25 free songs per month per user. However those services lose a tremendous amount of profit because of it (nearly $0.25 per user per month).
In my opinion Slacker is trying to tie together radio and personal collections of music like no other service has done before. And they might very well succeed.
Read [Wired]
Full Story » | Written by Hunter Clarke for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
It’s Friday, and that means only one thing: stupid videos, and lots of them. So, allow me to oblige. This here is a video found on a Brazilian Web site showing “the craziest simulator in the world.” Quite.
If you think the coming wave of tablets is about to make e-book readers obsolete, guess again.
Although dozens of tablets are scheduled to hit the market this year — from companies like Apple, HP and Dell, as well as upstarts like JooJoo — executives in the e-reader industry aren’t particularly worried.
Instead, they say, tablets and E Ink-based reading devices are likely to co-exist, targeting different groups of consumers based on their purchasing power, the extent of interactivity they need and their reading patterns.
“In the short term, every company is likely to have two lines of products,” says Robert Brunner, founder of Ammunition, a design firm that worked with Barnes & Noble to design the Nook e-reader. “If you think of a paperback-like reader, E Ink does a fantastic job. But color will definitely happen and it is likely to be LCD or OLED. It seems logical.”
Think of this strategy as something similar to the one employed by the print publishing industry. There are more expensive, better-designed hardcovers for consumers who value presentation — while the same books are often available in cheaper, but still functional, paperback editions.
In the digital world, that’s likely to translate into two sets of products: Full-featured tablets with color displays and lots of features that cost $400 or more, and inexpensive black-and-white E Ink-powered e-readers that will be available for $150 or less.
The launch of Amazon’s Kindle in 2007 kickstarted the market for electronic book readers. Last year, an estimated 5 million e-readers were sold and sales are expected to double this year. Meanwhile, companies like Apple and HP are promoting their tablets as devices that can be used to read digital books — although, as mini computers, these tablets can also do a lot more. Apple has already planned an iTunes-like iPad book store, called iBooks, that will compete with Amazon in selling electronic books.
The resurgence of tablets has given rise to chatter that tablets could mean the end of the road for e-readers. After all, who would want to buy a black-and-white Kindle that is basically good only for reading, when for only slightly more money, they could get a slick iPad that also does e-mail, shows movies, displays your photos and lets you edit documents?
That line of reasoning is moot, say executives in the e-reader industry.
“If reading is your primary entertainment activity, you are more likely to buy an e-reader,” says Glen Burchers, director of marketing for Freescale. “So this is a person who will pick up a book when they have the spare time instead of turning on the TV or opening up the computer.” Freescale’s processors power nearly 90 percent of the e-readers available currently.
Recent research commissioned by Freescale showed an e-reader buyer, on average, is 43 years old, earns $72,000 and buys two e-books a month.
Those who say they’re interested in buying a tablet tend to be much younger, Freescale’s research showed. Tablets will be more attractive to people who want to use them for reading but also for keeping up with their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.
An e-book designed for tablets could have interactive elements, color photos and video embeds, making it perfect for textbooks or cookbooks. Narrative non-fiction or fiction books need that kind of multimedia enhancement less, so they are more likely to be targeted at black-and-white e-readers, says Brunner.
E Ink screens aren’t particularly good at anything other than books, leaving newspapers and magazines out in the cold. That’s where tablets could step in, says James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research. Indeed, many magazines — including Wired — have already announced plans to develop electronic magazines that will work on tablets. But it will be a battle that could take a toll on e-paper based displays, he says.
“For people who read more of those media than they do books, tablets will be an ideal device and can easily take some wind out of E Ink sales, once we get beyond the fourth of the population that really enjoys reading books,” says McQuivey.
Still, tablets won’t immediately supplant lower-priced electronic paper-based e-readers, he notes.
“The first thing you need to consider is whether tablets will actually be as good for book reading as the E Ink readers are,” says McQuivey. “Having a two-week battery life and a device that’s comfortable to stare at for hours at a stretch without strain (as with e-paper based e-readers) is hard to beat.”
Another major factor is price. Currently, most e-readers cost about $260, and the cheapest e-reader currently available is a $200 Sony Reader. Driving the price down could help keep the category alive, especially if tablets cost $500 or more, as the iPad will.
Earlier this month, Freescale announced a new processor designed exclusively for e-readers that could bring down their cost to $150 and lower.
According to Freescale’s estimates, a $50 reduction in price potentially doubles the pool of consumers who say they will buy an e-reader.
“At this stage of the market, price is a very important factor for growth,” Freescale’s Burcher says.
So what’s a company like Amazon likely to do next? Create a color Kindle or a color tablet for e-reading?
Brunner says a tablet that puts e-reading at the center is a more likely response to the iPad. “They don’t have a choice if they want to offer a richer, more in-depth experience,” he says.
At least in the next two years, electronic paper displays are unlikely to offer color and video on par with LCD screens. E Ink’s color screens are not expected to be widely available until next year and alternative low power technologies, such as Qualcomm’s Mirasol, aren’t optimal for the large screens (greater than 6 inches) that are the hallmark of tablets. And even when these color, low-power display technologies become widespread, they will still lack the speed and contrast people are used to with LCDs.
Instead, say some industry executives, it is likely that Amazon could design a tablet with an LCD screen that puts digital books at the center of its user interface.
“Tablets currently focus on the web-surfing experience,” says Sri Peruvemba, vice-president of sales and marketing for E Ink. “But there’s room for a tablet that’s primarily targeted at students.”
Even if the e-readers market splits into two, it shouldn’t make a difference to publishers or readers, says Trip Adler, CEO of Scribd, a document-sharing social network. Companies like Scribd and Lulu support multiple devices including PC, smartphones and e-readers and a wide variety of formats such as ePub and PDF.
“People can upload a file in any format and we can convert it to all other formats,” says Scribd’s Adler. “We make the process simple.”
See Also:
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
By John Kell and Andrew Morse, Reporters, The Wall Street Journal
Apple Inc. (AAPL) awarded Chief Operating Officer Timothy Cook a cash-and-stock bonus worth about $22 million for filling in while Steve Jobs, the consumer electronics giant’s chief executive, was on medical leave.
The bonus, disclosed in a regulatory filing Friday, gives Mr. Cook $5 million in cash and 75,000 restricted stock units, half of which will vest on March 10, 2011, and the other half on March 10, 2012. At Friday’s closing price, those shares would be worth a little more than $17 million.
The bonus comes as Apple launches one of its most important products in recent memory, the iPad tablet computer. On Friday, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company began accepting pre-orders for the iPad, which will serve as a media player, book reader and Web surfing device. The iPad, which has been the subject of intense media attention this year, will ship on April 3.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
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A recent survey conducted by CareerBuilder on 5,200 mobile workers shows that over 57% of them use their smartphones in the bathroom. That’s just plain gross. Imagine this, one in two of your friendly co-workers have contaminated their smartphones while using them in the toilet. Not trying to be a hypocrite here, I admit that I DO use my phone in the bathroom, but it just doesn’t feel right when I know that others do that as well.
Other findings from this fun little survey reveals that more than half of the workers do the following while using their smartphones: while eating, while on vacation, check in bed, check in the bathroom and check while driving. The last factoid is especially disconcerting, here’s a word of advice: don’t let your smartphones get you into an accident!
Via [MobileCrunch]
Full Story » | Written by Cheng Hung for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Short version: Versatile but not particularly compact, the Vandal is a good choice for the hardcore urban biker/family man who needs to fit everything in his backpack, rain or shine.
Features:
Pros:
Cons:
Full review:
The right bag can make all the difference, and there are a hell of a lot to choose from, as we saw during Bag Week. For the gadgeteer, I found the Mamba Shift was great — for a laptop jockey, the Buran is a dream. But if I was travelling or shopping, I wouldn’t choose either if I had the option of the Mission Workshop Vandal. As long as you’re not carrying around a lot of little gadgets, this is a great choice for an all-purpose backpack.
Keep in mind during this review that the Vandal has a younger sibling, the Rambler, which is slightly smaller and costs $30 less, so if things seem a little big, there’s always that option.
So the general idea is that this is a relatively normal-sized backpack, weather-sealed of course, until you need it to carry a ton of junk, in which case you can unzip the sides and it accordions open, revealing a big-ass 800 cubic-inch space. In there goes your laundry, your groceries, your clothes for a trip, etc etc. I finally got a chance to put this to the test on a beautiful day in Seattle. I’d just had a long ride, which is why I’m winded in this video:
You know, in the video it doesn’t really look like that much stuff comes out of the bag, but trust me, it was packed. So that probably expresses more or less what I really need to say here.
Also: I’m very bad at taking pictures of backpacks and bags for some reason, which is why I’m using Mission Workshop’s official shots, except for this one:
Since it was nice out whenever I happened to take this bag with me, I didn’t really get to test out its weather sealing. So into the shower it went! I was happy to see that the water beaded up and flowed right off, as planned. Furthermore, there didn’t appear to be many catch points where the rivulets would collect, which points to good design on their part. It should be noted that the expandable portion of the backpack is not weather-sealed. I imagine this was necessary to let it compact well, but it’s a bummer nonetheless. That said, it’s not like it’s made of cheesecloth. You just can’t wear it in the shower. Also worth nothing: the padding that your back rests on is absorbent as well.
Another minor issue was that the straps have no elastic bands or obvious places to stow them. If you’re riding your bike, this leads to them whipping around and hitting your ears and back. A problem present on many backpacks to be sure, but it would have been nice to be able to lock those down.
I also felt there could have been more padding between the sections. The middle weather-proofed section is the logical one to put a laptop in, but there’s really nothing protecting it from shocks on either side. Likewise, there isn’t anywhere to put something like a camera and lens — to be fair, this is a problem shared by the Buran and many other backpacks, even the gadget-oriented Mamba Shift. But with so much cargo space, I’m disappointed there wasn’t a “safe area” for stuff like that.
Conclusion:
At $229 (or $199 for the slightly smaller Rambler), the Vandal is an expensive backpack. But that’s because it’s a durable, versatile, weather-proof backpack, not some $30 piece of garbage with a zipper that’ll break off after three months. I wish the Vandal had more padding and more ready access pockets, but that’s not really the kind of pack it is. I’d take this thing on a trip around the world in a second — wish I’d had it in Luxembourg when I stashed my regular-style pack under a bush and it started pouring like crazy. If all you need is something to pop your laptop and a book or two in, you’d be better off with a smaller, more tech-friendly bag. But if you’re the kind of person who really uses a pack like this, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
Product page: Mission Workshop Vandal
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ever wanted to tell the world how much you love BMW, Coca-Cola, and any of the other biggest brand names on Earth? Here’s your chance: MyBrandz is a new community site that looks to let people talk about their favorite brands with other users, allowing them to share their favorite products, photos, and more. You may remember MyBrandz as the company that convinced a guy to tattoo the YouTube logo to his arm a few months back.
My initial reaction to the site was that it was a bit bizarre — is there really an audience of people who want to talk about how much they love these multibillion dollar corporations (many of which couldn’t give a hoot about their customers)? And then I remembered the throngs of die-hard Apple fans that police internet forums, and the Ferrari store in downtown San Francisco that sells $200+ leather jackets emblazoned with the classic logo. Yeah, there’s definitely an audience for this.
Once you’ve browsed to the fan page of the company you like, you can share notes, photos, video, and links with like-minded fans. To help boost engagement, the site is currently running a promotion that invites users to ‘own their brand’ — the top user for a given brand site will win a free stock certificate. The site is happy to point out that “a Google share is worth more than $600 and an Apple share over $200″, but doesn’t go out of its way to say that the top user on Playboy’s fan page can expect a windfall of $3.58.
The site has some nice touches, like a scrolling wall of logos to help you quickly build out a roster of your favorite brands, and a graph that plots the ranking of brands based on their market value and popularity. But, as with most social sites, it’s going to face a chicken-and-egg problem. And many of these brands have already spawned their own communities and forums — it’s going to be hard to get those to migrate to MyBrandz.
Brand fans may also want to check out Logorama, the brand-studded animated short that just won an Oscar.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Well, the lawyers have won again. Netflix settled the privacy lawsuit brought about by their last contest out of court, and canceled the next contest. Good thing we have outraged class action lawsuits to protect us!
Netflix of course ran a contest to find a better algorithm to recommend movies. Harmless right? Well, in order to help people figure out how to do this, Netflix released a bunch of viewer reviews of movies to interested parties, and that’s where the problem came in. Apparently there was a little too much information in those reviews, which would apparently allow people to compare similarly word reviews to other sites, and thus potentially find out who the author really is. Netflix was promptly sued back in December, and just announced that they’ve settled out of court, and will be discontinuing any further contests.
[via The Firewall]
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Harbor East is hosting an art opening called "Tools, Trash and Technology - A 25-year retrospective of the Art and Design of Marque Cornblatt." Marque's whimsical, clever creations have been featured on BB and MAKE.
The event runs March 10-April 4, 2010 and is open Wednesday - Saturday 11 a.m. - 7 p.m. and Sunday 11 a.m. - 5 p.m.Opening reception for the artist Friday March 12, 5-8 PM
Cornblatt will personally be in the gallery each afternoon, offering hands-on demos and opportunities to operate the robots.
San Francisco-based and Baltimore native artist Marque Cornblatt will be presenting a 25-year retrospective of his work in Harbor East in Retail Suite 102 of The Legg Mason Tower. The exhibition will include self portraits, interactive sculptures, web-based robots, and video, as well as examples of Cornblatt furniture and interior design. This 25-year retrospective represents Cornblatt's return to exhibiting on the East Coast and his first major exhibition in Baltimore.
From the very first Sony Watchman to portable DVD players, no technology is off-limits to Cornblatt's creative eye. Using found objects, broken toys and re-purposed electronics, Cornblatt creates sculptures that challenge ideas about technology and the self. His recent use of videogames and virtual reality to create self-portraits offers a glimpse into the future of digital identity.
Cornblatt's will also be presenting the Sparky project, his pioneering interactive videochat robot. First shown in 1996, Sparky has evolved from an assemblage of mixed parts into a worldwide network of telepresence robots capable of connecting people face-to-face in real time over the internet.
The gallery will be furnished with examples of Cornblatt's handmade design and housewares, including cardboard furniture, metal and glass tables, candleholders, chess sets and object d'art made from scrap metal and other recycled materials.
Tools, Trash and Technology - A 25-year retrospective of the Art and Design of Marque Cornblatt
There was an interesting debate on today’s Ron and Fez that speaks to a subject we’ve been whinging about for some time now: digital delivery of content, specifically of music. Pink Floyd has won a court ruling that will put an end to places like iTunes selling its songs individually. The band feels that their music can only truly be appreciated in the album format, from start to finish, and it never liked people being able to pick and choose what songs they wanted to download.
I will say this right now: I’m not a Pink Floyd fan. I have nothing against them, but when kids were starting to get into bands like Pink Floyd, say around age 13 or 14, I was busy playing Final Fantasy. It’s a case of not being exposed to their music, and at this point, I’m not going to bother. My loss, I suppose. But don’t cry for me, because that’s makes me especially suited to write this story—I have no emotional attachment to the band in question.
The gist of the ruling—The High Court in the UK, to be exact—is that EMI, the band’s record label, won’t be allowed to sell individual songs from its catalog online. That means, from now on, you’ll only be able to buy The Wall as a full album online, and not merely “In The Flesh?” and “The Thin Ice.”
Yes, I had to Wiki that. Again, I wouldn’t know a Pink Floyd song if [insert cliché here].
That’s the debate: should consumers be allowed to buy whatever song they want without having to buy an entire album?
One side says, “Yes, consumers should be able to pick and choose whatever song they want without worrying about what any band says. Just because a band ’says’ its music can only be appreciated in album form doesn’t make it so. Is There Will Be Blood any less valuable when you’re watching the Blu-ray on your 60-inch plasma instead of at an actual movie theater?” (I’d say no, it’s not any less valuable, especially since I can control the viewing environment when I’m watching the Blu-ray—no having to worry about loud idiots texting back and forth with their mates.)
The other side says, “Well, Pink Floyd made the music, and only they know how it can be appreciated. If they intended for the songs to be listened to as an album, we as consumers should appreciate their artistic wishes.”
While I side with the first opinion, the fact is I really don’t care too passionately one way or the other. The band wants you to buy albums? Fine, whatever.
But surely Pink Floyd understands how music is consumed in the year 2010: people put their iPhone or iPod or Zune HD or whatever on shuffle mode, run on the treadmill at the gym for 20 minutes, and hear “Poker Face,” “Run This Town,” and “Lay in a Shimmer” all in a row. Young people ask, “What’s an album? I only listen to my Spotify playlist when I’m writing about what I did on my summer vacation.”
Don’t expect to see this trend—going back to album-based music sales—continue beyond Pink Floyd. The music industry knows people are already used to buying this or that song from iTunes, and it’s in no position to say, “Actually, we want album sales now. Sorry.” It’s grateful that people are buying music at all, let alone expecting people to buy entire albums.
This is where I throw it to y’all: is Pink Floyd in the right here? Should a band be allowed to dictate how its fans listen its music? Or is this a giant “who cares?” debate?
AP - Apple Inc. is giving its chief operating officer a $5 million bonus for "outstanding performance" running the company while CEO Steve Jobs was on medical leave.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Eyes turn to "value for money" London 2012 (Thanks, Bobby!)Police will have powers to enter private homes and seize posters, and will be able to stop people carrying non-sponsor items to sporting events.
"I think there will be lots of people doing things completely innocently who are going to be caught by this, and some people will be prosecuted, while others will be so angry about it that they will start complaining about civil liberties issues," Chadwick said.
"I think what it will potentially do is to prompt a debate about the commercial nature of the Games. Do big sponsors have too much influence over the Games?"
(Image: More Riot Police a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Kashklick's photostream)
Mobile social networks have tremendous potential to flourish in developing countries where mobile phone usage trumps internet connectivity. SMS based social networks like SMSGupshup have gained considerable traction in Asia because of this. For example, in India, there is currently a 10 to 1 mobile-to-PC ratio. Mig33, a mobile social network that involves VoIP calls, instant messaging, e-mail, text messaging, and picture sharing, has accumulated 35 million registered users of its service and is growing fast in South Asian markets such as Indonesia and India. Assuming 3 to 10 percent are active on a monthly basis, that would be 1 million to 3.5 million active users.
Mig33’s users are now sending over 1 million virtual gifts a month, and posting approximately 100 million messages a day on its network, or 1,000 messages every second. Twitter, in comparison, just passed 50 million a day. Mig33 is eying the virtual gift economy as a revenue maker because of the model’s success for China’s similar application, Tencent QQ. According to Mig33, the Chinese mobile social application has nearly 8% of its over 500 million users in China paying about $2 per month in virtual gifts and goods. Mig33 is hoping to emulate that model in markets like Indonesia, India, South Africa, Bangladesh, Kenya, and Bosnia.
Mig33 is available worldwide and optimized for more than 2,000 different mobile devices. The startup has steadily added to its app by integrating social games, user-owned groups, virtual gifting and, most recently, avatars. Avatars are actually a source of revenue for mig33, by charging users to customize and enhance their avatars. Mig33 is looking to expand the virtual economy. In fact, the startup says that its revenue stream has grown to over $1 per user per month in countries such as Indonesia and India.
Founded in 2005, mig33 is backed by Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and DCM and has raised a total of $23.5 million.
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Haven’t caught all of the Gadgetell news this week? Here’s your chance to catch up on this week’s top 10 articles!
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Watch out! Rumored launch dates are falling from the sky today. Next up is the dual-screen, Android-powered Spring Design Alex and a rumor that states the ebook reader is headed towards a March 16th launch. That’s next Tuesday, kids!
The only thing official so far is a note on the Spring Design website that reads,
Thanks for your patience. We’re almost ready with our Alex store.
Keep checking in and by the first week of March you’ll be able to order your Alex online.
–The Spring Design Team
We took a look at the Alex at CES 2010 and it’s definitely one step above the Nook in terms of taking advantage of the dual screen setup. Hopefully we’ll get a chance next week to see if it stands up to the Nook or Kindle in real world use, though.
By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
The South by Southwest Interactive festival starts today in Austin, and it looks as though the buzz is all about location-based services.
Twitter, which got a lot of attention at SXSW three years ago, officially added an option to its site that allows users to share their location in their tweets. In a posting on its blog, the site said “a recent burst of interest in location sharing” prompted it to add the feature.
Users can opt in to enable the sharing service and can decide whether to attach their location on a tweet-by-tweet basis. They also can choose whether to provide exact coordinates or just a neighborhood or town name. It’s an ideal feature to add in time for SXSW, which is spread over venues throughout a large area of Austin and also includes important music and film portions.
But the real attention is focused on two services that have been in the location-sharing business longer than Twitter–Foursquare and Gowalla. These two applications let users share where they are and compete to earn virtual prizes based on how often and where they “check in” to the app.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The light from the lamps in your house could carry a wireless signal that could power internet connectivity at home, say a group of German researchers who say they have found a way to encode the signals into visible frequency.
Though it would provide much lower speeds than Wi-Fi signals, it can offer less interference and is likely to offer great protection from hackers, say the researchers.
Currently, most homes use radio-frequency based Wi-Fi signals for broadband service. But Wi-Fi has limited bandwidth, says the researchers, and it is difficult to get more radio spectrum for it. Visible frequency would be a good alternative, they say.
Flickering the lights can generate the signal in a room. The change won’t be visible to the human eye because the rate of modulation is millions of times faster than what we can see, say the researchers. And since, visible light can’t penetrate walls there will be no interference.
Since incandescent and fluorescent bulbs can’t flicker fast enough, LEDs would be the right choice, say the researchers.
Commercial LEDs have a bandwidth of only a few MHz. But Jelena Vučić, a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, and her colleagues who have been working on the project have found a way to increase the bandwidth by filtering out all wavelengths but blue.
Using the visible wireless system they built, the team downloaded data at up to 230 megabits per second. The researchers will present their findings at a conference in San Diego later this month.
[via Inhabitat]
Photo: (slworking/Flickr)
We know what you’re thinking. “Man! Now that Microsoft has confirmed (and re-confirmed) that the HD2 won’t be getting an (officially endorsed) upgrade to Windows Phone 7, I can only hope that it will some day be able to run a desktop OS from fifteen years ago!”
Well, friend, that day has come.
Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>
Hunch, a buzzy start-up that answers questions using crowdsourced recommendations, has resolved one query of its own: Who’s going to fund our B round?
Sources tell me that Khosla Ventures is leading a new round that will add another $10 million to $12 million to the start-up’s bank account. General Catalyst Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Ron Conway, who put $2 million into the company a year ago, are reinvesting.
I’m told that Gideon Yu, the former CFO of both Facebook and YouTube, is steering the investment for Khosla.
Hunch was co-founded by Caterina Fake, who founded Flickr and sold it to Yahoo (YHOO) in 2005, and Chris Dixon, who built SiteAdvisor and sold it to McAfee (MFE) in 2006.
Hunch is still a modest-sized site–its internal numbers put it at 1.2 million unique visitors–but Fake and Dixon are well-regarded entrepreneurs. And while they don’t like to be compared with Aardvark, which has a vaguely similar concept, the linkage does have some upside: Last month, Google (GOOG) bought that site for $50 million.
I asked Fake, Dixon and Yu for comment. Until I hear from them, you can read up on Hunch in Kara Swisher’s story from last month. Or you can watch this interview.
We know what you’re thinking. “Man! Now that Microsoft has confirmed (and re-confirmed) that the HD2 won’t be getting an (officially endorsed) upgrade to Windows Phone 7, I can only hope that it will some day be able to run a desktop OS from fifteen years ago!”
Well, friend, that day has come.
The always incredible folks over at XDA-Dev have successfully managed to get Windows 95 up and running on the QEMU virtual machine emulator. Stuff like this generally runs slow as dirt, but coupled with the HD2’s 1ghz processor, there seems to be enough meat here to muscle through the fairly complex emulation.
[Good find, WMpoweruser!]
 CBC.ca | Scenes from GDC 2010 CNET With the 2010 edition of the Game Developers Conference winding down, we've put together a short photographic tour of our week, from Sony's PlayStation Move launch to the booth-filled expo hall. Though surprises were few and far between ... Sony's PlayStation Move: What You Need To Know SOCOM 4, played with PlayStation Move: our thoughts PlayStation Move: A peek at the games |
You get all geared up in hopes to buy the gadget you like at a store in the city. After making your way through the hustle and bustle of the city streets and finally finding a place to park your car, you found out that the store didn’t have your dream gadget in stock. Has this ever happened to you?
Good news people! Google has just released a new feature for Product Search for mobiles. All you have to do is head over to Google.com on your mobile browser, then tap on More and select “Shopping”. Search for something you like, and if a blue dot appears in a product listing, it means that there’s a store nearby you that has the product in stock. If you click on the adjacent “In stock nearby” link, you’ll be brought to the seller’s page with more information on the product availability, whether it’s “In Stock” or has “Limited Availability”. Participating retailers include Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn or West Elm. If you have enabled My Location or manually specified a location on your cell phone, you will see how far away the store is from you.
Read [Google Mobile Blog]
Full Story » | Written by Cheng Hung for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 PC World | Microsoft Xbox Sales Top Wii, PS3 InformationWeek But sales of all gaming hardware, including the Sony PS2, PlayStation Portable, and Nintendo DS, are down from a year ago. By Antone Gonsalves Six months after being named the most unreliable video game console, with a failure rate eight times that of ... Face-Off: Microsoft vs. Sony on February Game Sales BioShock 2 PS3, Aliens vs. Predator Jump Into February Top 20 February 2010 NPD Number Crunch: BioShock 2, Xbox 360 top console sales |
By Nitrozac and Snaggy
Sometimes it is obvious where the world is headed, but some people and industries become frozen in place and time. They are like the duckbilled dinosaurs happily munching on the still-abundant plants around them when the meteor strikes instead of the small furry mammals underfoot who take cover every day by natural habit. In the print newspaper industry, it’s the same story. Everyone wants to wall off the Web and keep grazing on declining ad revenues.
A week ago, I wrote a post based on a conversation I had with Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen in which he made the case that print media companies would be better off shutting down their print operations now (“Burn the boats”) and move forward unencumbered into the digital age, no matter how painful that may be. That suggestion hit a deep nerve, and continues to do so.
Just yesterday, Allan Mutter, who writes the blog Reflections of a Newsosaur, took exception to Andreessen’s advice. By his estimate, in 2009:
Print-driven newspaper revenues still are running at better than $30 billion a year. It doesn’t take a certifiable Silicon Valley genius to see that no business can walk away from some 90% of its revenue base without imploding.
Mutter’s indignation is typical of the response to the article, even among enlightened newsosaurs. But that is exactly what Andreessen is saying. As I noted in my original post, he is quite aware that “at risk is 80% of revenues and headcount” (or 90%, if you take Mutter’s numbers).
Yes, the Internet media business is much less lucrative than the print side, and may never replace it in terms of the revenues it generates. But Andreessen’s point is that the meteor is on its way and the sooner that media companies start looking for cover, the more likely they are to survive.
He is not trying to be an alarmist. He’s just a realist. In the technology industry, similar disruptions happen all the time. The companies that survive are the ones that adapt and jump onto the next wave of technology before the one they are on finishes cresting. So the real question is one of timing. How long will it take that $30 billion print business to go to $20 billion, $10 billion, or zero? No doubt, it will take years, probably decades. But how long do print media companies wait before they leave their old business behind?
The people who read print newspapers and magazines are getting older and older, while advertisers always chase the young and impressionable. That audience is already on the Web. And they are no longer satisfied with getting all of their news from one or two trusted sources. They get their news from all over the place: newspaper sites, TV news sites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook. More and more, the news is coming to them through their friends and the various streams they consume. The old days of cross-subsidizing political news with ads from the Travel and Auto sections are over.
The longer media companies wait, the bigger disadvantage they will have when they cross over to the other side and find a whole new host of competitors who never had any print legacy businesses to protect. Those competitors right now are blogs and online news hubs who are still furry little rodents in the underbrush, but who won’t stay little forever. The sooner print media companies cross over, the sooner they can be on pure offense. Their online strategies and business models won’t be crippled by any allegiance, or need to protect, to the old print business. If they wait until their online revenues become 25 or 50 percent before they fully commit, it will be too late.
But that is probably what will happen. Media companies are still surrounded by $30 billion worth of leaves that look mighty good.
Photo of duckbilled dinosaur fossil by Ed Schipul .
Brightkite is tricky. Tricky and smart.
While larger than most of their location-based rivals with over 2 million users, they know that in the past year they’ve lost some momentum to the newer check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla. So they’re trying to do something unique to swing momentum back in their favor.
Today, at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, Brightkite is unveiling its new Group Text service. It’s both a feature on the website and a standalone application in the App Store (it should be available shortly). With it, Brightkite is latching onto one of the most popular and fast growing categories in mobile applications: group texting. Unlike regular text messaging, this type of app allows you to message many people all at once (and go back and forth). And better, in a world where cell providers are still managing to rip-off users with their text message bundles or $0.15 rate per-text, group texting is absolutely free.
Services such as textPlus have already made the functionality very popular on the iPhone, and now Brightkite hopes that will translate into converting different types of users over to its core location-based service. The reason is that built-in to the Brightkite Group Text app is the core Brightkite functionality itself. While it’s a bit buried to the left hand side of the menu, you can both check-in at venues, and get check-in updates from other users in the app.
It’s a smart play. As other location services such as MyTown have proven, there’s a market to get users outside of the traditional early-adopter crowd into location by doing something novel (in their case, a straight-up Monopoly-type game). Group texting users seem to be rabid about the software, so why not give them a little location-based bonus to play around with if they desire?
At the same time, this app provides a nice compliment to the Brightkite service itself. With it, users get another social outlet to communicate with, sending messages or pictures, and having them threaded both in the app and online. And yes, it still works with traditional SMS messaging, as Brightkite was lucky enough to be granted a texting shortcode (41414) and it can work with these threaded conversations. For example:
By adding three digits to the end of the code, each person can now have 100 simultaneous threaded text conversations running on their phone.
41414-001 = conversation 1
41414-002 = conversation 2
And thanks to the SMS support, you can contact anyone in your address book, not just those using the app.
The service is now live on Brightkite’s site, and look for it later today in the App Store.
FROM GAMERTELL - The Joos Orange is a new solar charging device that generates up to 20 times more energy than any other solar device.
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Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Boy Genius tends to know what he’s talking about when it comes to BlackBerry leaks – so when he says hes got some new details, we tend to believe him.
According to his tipsters, the Verizon BlackBerry Tour 9630 will be seeing an upgrade to BlackBerry OS 5.0 sometime in the next month. With that upgrade, says the same tipster, comes the option of push-to-talk functionality for an extra 5 bucks a month.
But that’s not all! This all leads up to the release of a brand spankin’ new piece of BlackBerry kit — presumably a new Tour — launching some time around May, complete with OS 5.0 and push-to-talk functionality out of the box. Alas, that’s all we know about it at this point; keep your ears to the ground for us, won’t you?
[Via BGR]
By Geoffrey A. Fowler, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Plastic Logic, the maker of an e-reader targeting business users, told customers on Thursday that it would delay the delivery of its first Que readers until the summer. The company had said at the Consumer Electronics Show in January that the device would be delivered in mid-April.
In an e-mail to customers who pre-ordered the product, Plastic Logic’s CEO Richard Archuleta said that delay was due to an effort to “fine-tune the features and enhance the overall product experience,” he wrote. He added: “I can imagine that you want to get your QUE proReader as soon as possible. We are sorry for the delay. For your inconvenience, the shipping charges will be on us.”
Betty Taylor, a spokeswoman for the company, said in an e-mail that that Plastic Logic has seen “overwhelmingly positive response” to its device since CES.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Last night, we wrote about a CauseWorld teaming up with TechCrunch to provide double karma points during the SXSW festival starting today in Austin, Texas. These points, obtained through checking-in at various locations, can be used to donate to charities through big brands that support the app. It’s a great feature, and we hope you’ll use it in Austin. What we didn’t talk too much about is the app itself that enables it, CauseWorld, which just released a new version of its iPhone app in the App Store.
We first covered the app back in December, but now it has been significantly upgraded. One of the core ideas behind the app has always been the intersection of the mobile and physical world (something I’ve thought a lot about as well). A new feature bridges the gap a bit more as you can now scan barcodes on individual items with your iPhone to earn extra karma points. Proctor & Gamble are the ones sponsoring these points on different products they make. It’s a good idea, because even if you choose not to buy the item, it forces you to pick it up and look at it a bit.
This feature points to the bigger idea that CauseWorld parent Shopkick is thinking about when it is ready to launch its flagship product (CauseWorld was born as just a trial site of an idea, but quickly ballooned into an app with over 300,000 downloads). It’s the idea that the cellphone is the only interactive tool you carry in a non interactive setting at all times. So why not use it to make the physical retail space more interactive, Shopkick CEO Cyriac Roeding reasons.
Another huge addition to the CauseWorld app is a social layer. Previously, the app was all about what you did. But now you can hook it up to Facebook (which will earn you bonus karma points) and share the progress and donations you’re making with your friends. On top of this there are new features such as gifting which will help the app virally spread through social networks.
This social layer also allows for a leaderboard to be created showing which of your friend have donated the most karma points. Sometimes social pressure is the best way to get people motivated.
Again, CauseWorld stems from trying out an idea to see what would work with the larger Shopkick plan when that eventually launches. But the response to it has shown Roeding enough that he believes ”the next big thing after the check-in is the check-out.” Given the big brands they’re signing up to support CauseWorld, he just might be right.
You can find the new CauseWorld 1.5 in the App Store here. It’s a free download.
If I lose my phone, it’s a bad day. If this guy loses his phone, he just lost the equivalent of a CEO’s salary.
According to Brandon Chang, the ridiculous piece of absurdity you see up above is wrapped in 18 karat gold. Because that wasn’t enough, they then went and glued on 4,150 itty-bitty diamonds, ensuring that you can see just how tacky it is in even the lowest of lights.
The final price tag? $200,000 bucks. If you’ve got that sort of money to throw around, more power to you – but really, there’s a line between “impressive” and “obnoxious”, and this is a few miles past it.
[Via BlackBerryCool]
Section: Communications, Smartphones, Mobile, Gadgets / Other, GPS/Navigation, Household, Robots/AI, Gaming, Games, Features, Originals, Columns, Who's On Crack
Welcome to another week gone that you are not getting back. No matter how much we loathe the week, it’s in the books and no amount of illegal narcotics is going to change that fact. For these nominees, who I suspect are on crack, this week hasn’t been kind. Let’s get to it:
Verizon is apparently licking its chops over the iPad plus MiFi, its mobile WiFi hotspot device. Our Sue Walsh reports, “Although the iPad’s 3G version is targeted for AT&T users only, Verizon is seeing a golden opportunity in the device’s upcoming release. Sales documents leaked to Engadget show Verizon is prepping it’s staff to encourage customers to buy the WiFi only version instead and then pick up a MiFi and data plan It’s a savings of $130 for the customer and a sweet deal for Verizon”
Only math stands in the way of this nirvana. At $60 per month for the Verizon connection, that’s 2x more than the AT&T plan. We’ll come back to AT&T networks in a sec, but just assuming all thing equal, you’ll pay an extra $720 over the life of the two-year contract, but can subtract $130 for needing only the Wi-Fi version iPad. That means you’ll only pay an extra $590 plus a two year lock in. Sweet?
Maybe. Obvi, if you’ve already got a MiFi, this is pretty moot. Or if you live where AT&T’s service is as strong as me in 7th grade, you’re excused; $590 might be something you can deal with . For those who really can’t tell the signal quality difference between carriers, it’s a big bill to swallow. I don’t see Verizon getting a big bump here, do you? It’s either wishful thinking or straight in from dropping a rock in the bathroom.
Yay! Android is now on AT&T. Boo! It’s locked down. Our Shawn Ingram tells us, “AT&T has made their first foray into the Android smartphone market, and it looks to be rather depressing.”
Android was supposed to be the “chosen one”, the one who would bring balance to the mobile phone OS galaxy. In this form, more chained down than Princess Leia in a metal bikini, the Backflip can only download apps from the store and is limited on what can be deleted. Can we stand for this?
Or will anyone care? I mean unsavory apps, are, well, unsavory right? Who says Android has to be the wild west? Is everyone picking up Android phones because you can do what ever you want, or do you just want some cute little robot popping up on your phone once in a while? My money is on the robot.
If you are like me, you should read Appletell more often. If only for the Kirk Hiner reviews, like the one he just did on Moshi, the simple talking alarmclock.
“The talking bit is cool, of course, but potentially troublesome. The “Time” command is bound to annoy anyone with whom you share a bed. Rolling over to see the time is not going to wake up my wife. Having a conversation with some strange female voice likely will.”
The image Kirk paints about having a conversation with an appliance while Mrs. Hiner is trying to sleep is fantastic. The best reccomendation Kirk can come up with are single folks who like to talk to things like plants and street signs or the blind. If that isn’t an editor doing his best to show some respect for the countless hours behind creating and delivering a talking alarm clock, I don’t know what is.
While I am sharing some love with sister sites, over at Gamertell, Christian Morlotte found a wedding invitation that requires invitees to play and beat a game to even get to the invitation. Fantastic stuff.
As Christian explains, “The game, called Darina and Niko’s Incredible Adventure, is presented in a vintage-8-bit style and features a couple of stages where players can choose either the bride or the groom to rescue their significant other. The game takes inspiration from Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong and the reward for completing the game is the invitation to the wedding itself. As an ending, players get the date and directions to the wedding.”
I assume, since the happy couple seems to be real gamers, if you don’t beat the final boss you don’t get to come. Sorry granny, sorry near-blind Uncle Bill, you’ll be missed at the wedding. How soon do you think before a “Darina and Niko Incredible Adventure” forum popped up? On the forum I suspect they’d be trading cheat codes, sharing leads on hidden Easter Eggs in the game, competing for fastest time and making wild prediction on the inevitable sequels: “Darina and Niko’s Amazing Race to the Delivery Room” or for the more pessimistic “Darina’s escape from the controlling and oft drunk Niko”.
See you on the forum, crackers.
Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Plastic Logic, which was set to ship its large screen Que e-reader in April, is now delaying it to “sometime this summer.”
The company sent notifications to pre-order customers late Thursday afternoon announcing the delay and saying it needed the time to “fine-tune features and enhance the overall product.”
Plastic Logic launched the Que at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. The Que proReader has an 8.5 x 11-inch touchscreen display and the ability to handle a range of documents such as Microsoft Word files, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, digital books, PDFs, magazines and newspapers. It can also synchronize with Microsoft Outlook to display e-mails and calendar.
A 4-GB version of the Que with Wi-Fi and storage for about 35,000 documents will cost $650. An $800 8-GB version that can store 75,000 documents and includes both Wi-Fi and 3G capability — powered by AT&T– will be $800.
Plastic Logic CEO Richard Archuleta didn’t reveal the exact reasons for the delay. But if it is to make sure that the company works out all the kinks in the product before it ships, he may have made the right decision. Last year, many e-reader enthusiasts criticized Barnes & Noble for rushing its Nook e-reader to market. Barnes & Noble has since the launch offered firmware updates to fix some of the Nook’s problems.
But the delay is also likely to cost Plastic Logic some ground. Apple’s iPad tablet will be available April 3 and the device starts at $500. Though it doesn’t offer an E Ink screen, the iPad is also targeted at consumers who want to read digital books. Apple will have its own iBook store, similar to iTunes, so consumers can buy digital books directly from the device.
Meanwhile, other companies such as Dell and HP are also planning to launch their own tablets and plan to highlight digital reading as one of the key experiences on the device.
See Also:
Photo: Que (Priya Ganapati/Wired.com)
When it began taking pre-orders for the iPad this morning, Apple also published some new details about how the tablet device will function as an e-book reader.
It turns out the iPad will read books out loud to you with audio dictation, a controversial feature that caused some trouble for Amazon’s Kindle last year. Also, Apple indicated that you’ll be able to use the iPad to read EPUB titles from sources outside of the iBooks store.
The new features are described in the iBooks overview page on Apple’s website. In the section titled “Change your reading habits,” Apple says its VoiceOver functionality — an accessibility tool that works in other parts of the iPad’s interface to help visually impaired users — will also work to dictate e-books.
“IBooks works with VoiceOver, the screen reader in iPad, so it can read you the contents of any page,” Apple’s description reads.
And for EPUB titles that are not offered through the iBooks store, you can manually add them to iTunes and then sync them to the iPad:
“The iBooks app uses the EPUB format — the most popular open book format in the world,” Apple’s site reads. “That makes it easy for publishers to create iBooks versions of your favorite reads. And you can add free EPUB titles to iTunes and sync them to the iBooks app on your iPad.
That’s good news for iPad customers, because that means bookworms won’t be limited to the offerings in the iBooks store, which are based on partnerships that Apple inked with publishers.
The new detail about audio dictation should raise more questions. Amazon’s Kindle 2 reader shipped with a function to read e-books out loud, and the Authors Guild made a fuss alleging copyright violations that would cut into sales of audiobooks.
“They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”
The guild contended that authors should be awarded audio-licensing fees for e-books. Responding to the criticism, Amazon said “no copy is made, no derivative work is created and no performance is being given.” Nonetheless, Amazon in late February 2009 gave rights-owners the choice to enable or disable the audio function title by title.
There’s no word on whether the Author’s Guild will pursue a similar complaint against Apple.
The National Federation of the Blind has already applauded Apple for including VoiceOver in the iPad.
iBooks description [Apple]
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Additional reporting by Charlie Sorrel
We’ve written about FunMobility’s nifty picture messaging app for the iPhone and Android, called FunMail, that allows users to blasts their text into the application, which then breaks down whatever the user typed for context and places fun graphics with your original text. Now, FunMobility has caught the Twitter bug and is launching FunTweet, a web service which turns any Twitter stream into visual messages that are related to the text.
Similar to FunMail, FunTweet will turn text in Tweets into a matching image. On FunTweet’s site, you sign in with your Twitter credentials and the service will draw your Tweets from your Twitter homepage feed and display each tweet as a FunMail image on FunTweet. Users can also enter a @UserName, a HashTag or a Subject as well to the images. If you like the image FunTweet picked, you can publish the Tweet to your Twitter account. If you don’t like the image, click “Try Again” and you can choose from other images. For example, if you tweet about writing a story or reading a book, then FunTweet will come up with images that match “story” – a book, a magazine, a typewriter, or a pen.
FunMobility is hoping FunTweet can be a display tool for parties, conferences and other gatherings where live stream messages may be projected. I find myself wishing I could include my own pictures into my FunTweets so I’m hoping the site will soon include that functionality.
FunMail for the iPhone has gained a bit of traction in a short amount of time with 100,000 downloads since its launch in November. So FunTweet could gain a loyal following a fun tool to spice up Tweets. TwitSig and SayTweet also allow you to make images from Tweets.
This is the lede, verbatim, from a story that appeared in The Hill yesterday: "The Internet allowed extremists to contact, recruit, train and equip the suspect responsible for the attempted Flight 253 bombing on Christmas Day 'within weeks,' a top Pentagon official told lawmakers Wednesday." What's the implication, that because someone used the Internet to plan something, something bad, we should get rid of it? Fine by me, believe me.
The Tattoo might have been designed to be dirt cheap, but that doesn’t mean HTC doesn’t love it as much as the rest of their phones.
French Android site Frandroid shot a note to HTC to see whether or not the Tattoo would be getting the Android 2.1 treatment. Their response? Drumroll, please.
Yep! (See response below) They aren’t dropping any specific dates, but they did say it’ll be “just a little while longer”. The hang up? HTC’s still polishing up Sense on Android 2.1. Sense seemed pretty dang solid when we saw it running on 2.1 on the Desire – but given that the Tattoo is half as powerful with half the screen resolution, there’s probably some tweaking that needs to be done here.
HTC’s response:
“Kindly note that now we understand that a phone running Android OS 2.1 is available that you are excited to get an update for your Tattoo. We are still working hard to Sense for building this new version but we expect to have the upgrade finished and ready to go soon.”
[Via GSMArena]
Sonos has now confirmed the Index Ventures investment we reported two days ago. The company has taken an additional $25 million in capital from Index, raising the total raised by the company to $65 million. And Index Ventures Partner Mike Volpi, a former CIsco executive, has joined their board of directors.
The funds will be used for growth equity, says the company, which signals that they are past the proof of product stage (well past, in this case) and will use the funds to speed market penetration.
From our original post:
Volpi will bring real expertise to the Sonos board. As recently as 2007 he ran an $11 billion routing and access products busines for Cisco. He clearly knows how to sell products at scale.
Sonos has been around since 2003 and has raised some $40 million from private angel investors and BV Capital. Until last year the company sold very high end music products that users loved passionately, but the mutli-thousand dollar price point for a complete system made mainstream penetration difficult.
But in 2009 Sonos began selling a new product, the S5 music system, that users control via their iPhone. The S5 is just $400 and has driven “massive growth” says the company.
Like Flip last year, Sonos likely had a choice between selling now or raising new money for major expansion. Flip sold to Cisco. Sonos, it seems, is taking more money, but adding an ex-Cisco exec as well. Perhaps they’ll get their cake and eat it, too.
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Email / IM, Smartphones, Mobile
ZD Net has declared, “Google’s online-only phone selling model has failed.” Today, Goldman-Sachs announced they will slash estimates for Nexus One sales by 70%. Can we call the experiment a failure?
The Google store was supposed to revolutionize how we bought phones, free from the high pressure sales of tiny phone stores across the country. The store may have opened with excitement from the blogging media, but poor customer support limited how much love was shown. to be fair, many in the blogging world picked up the Nexus One.
Is it fair to call it a failure? I don’t think so, and here is why: they’ve had one phone on one network. T-Mobile was the opening network way back when Android was a baby. It isn’t the most popular, nor is it the most robust. But T-Mobile is only part of the problem.
The other is advertising. Consumers buy phones based on advertising and putting some fingerprints on one in the local phone store. Who among us have the confidence to commit to 2-years on something we’ve never held (or seen if we have an allergic reaction to)? The answer for the most part is bloggers and uber-techies.
A coming Verizon variety of the Nexus One might solve a lot of this issue and could possible make Goldman-Sachs turn red. If Google puts some TV time behind the phone and Verizon lends a hand with yet more Android love, the Nexus One could ride into the spotlight again.
Will the Google Store be as successful as your local phone store? Or even discounters like Firefly or LetsTalk? No. We do see it becoming a place where those “in the know” can get the top tech. Anything beyond that is wishful thinking. We can’t help wondering how well the Nexus One would do in Verizon’s store.
Read: [ZD Net]
Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Earlier this week, BoomTown had lunch with Michelangelo “Mike” Volpi, the high-profile tech exec who turned into a venture capitalist recently at Index Ventures.
We also did a video interview (see below) about his new life as an investor, based in London, although Volpi managed to leave out the big news.
That would be a just-inked $25 million investment by Index from its growth equity arm in wireless home music system maker Sonos, as well as a new board seat there for Volpi. (Sonos’s hot new S5 unit is pictured here.)
In an interview this morning, Sonos CEO John MacFarlane said the money would be used for expansion at Sonos, which is just about to introduce its products to China and Japan.
“This investment is going to help us grow,” said MacFarlane. “We have wind at our back and this will help us a lot in keeping up that momentum.”
MacFarlane said the focus for Sonos, which has garnered $65 million–from BV Capital and mostly angel investors–with the Index investment included, is growth. He declined to give Sonos’s valuation in the new round.
The private company has been profitable, MacFarlane said, but its goal is to break even as it takes advantage of interest in its devices globally. Only about 35 percent of its business is now in the United States.
While running a small independent consumer electronics company is a dicey proposition, MacFarlane said Sonos is not interested in selling, as Pure Digital–maker of the Flip digital camera–did to Cisco (CSCO) a year ago for $590 million in stock.
In fact, Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Sonos, which is well known for its innovative top-line (and high-priced) music players, recently moved its business more mainstream with the introduction of the S5 unit in November.
The S5 allows control of the system via an Apple (AAPL) iPhone and only costs $399. (Here is a review of it by The Mossberg Solution’s Katie Boehret.)
The basic idea? A smart speaker paired with a smartphone.
The S5 has been a big seller and has increased product registration–when the software is activated by a user–by five times previous numbers so far, according to the company.
That could get a further boost with the April launch of the iPad, which seems perfect for controller software apps.
“The popularity of the iPhone is great for us,” said MacFarlane. “And we’ll do something great with the iPad.”
It will be nice to have a big score for Volpi, the former Cisco wunderkind. In fact, he invested in one of MacFarlane’s previous start-ups, Software.com, in 1995 when he was in charge of a variety of businesses there.
But the affable Volpi hit a bad patch recently while CEO of a much hyped but ultimately failed video service called Joost. It was that job that landed him in even hotter water.
In the wake of the decline of Joost, which he left to join Index, he was personally sued, along with Index, by its litigious co-founders over Index’s planned investment in Skype, the online telephony service they also co-founded.
Confused? Well, it was confusing.
And not the best start in the investment business for Volpi, after Index pulled out of the high-profile deal in a settlement of the lawsuits.
But, that’s “ancient history,” as Volpi said in the video interview below, which focuses on what’s next.
(News of the Index involvement in Sonos was first reported by TechCrunch earlier this week, though it did not have any details on the amount of funding.)
Although he did not mention the $25 million Sonos funding specifically in the video, Volpi does discuss his bullishness for consumer electronics.
Volpi presumably hopes others share his enthusiasm.
Here’s the video of my interview with him:
So you’ve been using your iPhone for a couple months or years now. You might be addicted to your iPhone. Even if you’re not addicted, chances are that you have a stock of applications on which you rely heavily. Without a doubt, the single most useful application on my iPhone, and the one I use constantly throughout the day, is email. I live by email, and I read and compose email messages far more often than I make actual phone calls with my phone. To preserve my sanity, I’ve disabled the notification sound for new emails: if I hadn’t, my phone would be making noise pretty constantly throughout the day. But that’s not an ideal situation, because there are times when I do want to be notified of an important new email. Enter MailTones, an application that allows you to set custom alert tones, and makes good use of Apple’s push notifications.
MailTones is the first and only app to let iPhone users change the sound of their email alerts – both for “all” mail, and with different custom tones for different sender domains, subjects and individual friends… which adds enormous fun and practical value to the email on the iPhone – in ways which were simply not possible before!
This is a simple little app, but there’s a big catch: in order to enjoy push notifications, you need to forward your mail to a special address assigned to you at mailtones.net. Once that’s done, MailTones will work its magic and send you push notifications of new email messages. On the whole, this setup works well, but there can be some synchronization issues depending on how compulsively you check your new email: you might get a notification of a message you’ve already read.
You have the choice of forwarding all your mail to MailTones, and then using the MailTones iPhone app to set up a variety of rules for notifications. You can match on a specific sender address, any sender from a specific domain, or subject line contents. You can have multiple overlapping rules defined, and the MailTones app will follow a specific flow to determine which sound to play. For example, if I define a domain match for @crunchgear.com, and also specify a contact match for john@crunchgear.com, the tone I specify for John will be played rather than the tone for @crunchgear.com. The matching goes by sender address, then subject contents, then domain, and finally if none of those match the default tone will be played.
You also have the choice of selectively forwarding mail from your account(s) to MailTones. This is what I did in my GMail account. Rather than forward everything, I defined a couple of filters to selectively forward only mail for which I might like to be notified.
This allows me to rely on the default MailTones notification for those messages I forward, and I can then fine-tune the notifications based on sender address or subject line matching.
By default, MailTones is on all the time. If you forget to toggle the speaker switch on your iPhone, you’ll get email notifications all night long. Thankfully, there is a “Do Not Disturb” option in the MailTones preferences which allows you to specify a time range during which notifications should be suppressed.
You can get MailTones in the App Store for $2.99, with no on-going subscription costs. This is a pretty good price for an application that really adds a new level of functionality to your iPhone.
By Aaron Back and Jason Dean, Reporters, The Wall Street Journal
A Chinese minister made the government’s strongest statement yet on Google Inc.’s (GOOG) future in the country, warning that the U.S. Internet company “will have to bear the consequences” if it follows through on its pledge to stop censoring its Chinese search site.
Google said on Jan. 12 that it intended to stop following government requirements that it filter certain content from the results of its Chinese search engine, Google.cn. The company has been in talks in recent weeks with Chinese agencies about whether it can continue to operate Google.cn unfiltered–and if not, whether other parts of its Chinese operation would be affected.
At a press conference Friday, Li Yizhong, Minister of Industry and Information Technology, was asked by a reporter how China would react if Google does stop censoring Google.cn. “I hope Google can respect Chinese rules and regulations,” responded Mr. Li, whose ministry is one of several that regulates China’s Internet.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
As we comb through the updated Apple website for more iPad-related clues, up pops this new picture detailing the physical buttons on the iPad. Now, in addition to the sleep/wake, home and volume buttons familiar to iPhone users, there is a new button named screen rotation lock.
And thank God. One of the most annoying things about the auto-rotating iPhone screen is the way it flips into landscape mode if you lie down whilst reading. Some apps have a preference setting to switch this off, but we’d much rather have a hardware switch. Hopefully this will come to this year’s new iPhones and iPod Touches, too.
We’ll keep looking for any other new tidbits. If you have spotted anything else, let us know in the comments.
iPad Technical Specifications [Apple via the Giz and Loop Insight]
Section: Communications, Cellular Providers, Mobile, Web, Web Apps, Websites, Google
Google Voice is turning 1 year old today and celebrating complete with birthday cake and all. Personally, it seems as if Google Voice has been around for longer, but maybe that is because I had been using the service as GrandCentral. And at the same time, Google Voice has grown into a service that I use on a daily basis. In fact it has become my phone number, or maybe I should describe that as my phone service. Either way, with Google Voice combined with Gmail you have a powerful combination. A few examples include being able to have my voicemail sent to my email with both a transcription and also a copy of the message as well as using SMS by email. Of course, lets not forget the nice HTML5 based web app as well as the wonderful integration with Android. Plus, as a tech blogger it makes reviewing phones much nicer.
Read [Google Voice Blog]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Google and Apple may be fighting each other on multiple fronts, but they’re deeply linked, too. Another example: Apple is flooding Google search results with the contents of its iTunes store.
That’s the result of a small but consequential move Apple (AAPL) made last fall when it began showing Web searchers full-fledged previews of the stuff it sells at its online stores instead of directing them immediately to the store itself.
The biggest impact appears to be on the 140,000 apps Apple sells, which seem to be getting increased visibility from Apple’s links. So says Weldon Dodd, who has put together an interesting study of apps and search results over at The Apple Blog.
For most of Apple’s best-selling apps, Dodd found, Apple’s preview links are likely to turn up on the first page of Google (GOOG) results, and usually much higher up than the developers’ own pages.
So Apple, in effect, is performing search engine optimization on behalf of its developers. That’s the good news. The bad news is that developers don’t have control over or insight into the process. Which means it’s that much harder for them to direct traffic in a retail environment that’s already tightly policed by Apple.
[Image credit: Stig Nygaard]
Well, well, well — lookie here. See that screenshot up above? That’s allegedly a screen shot of the Verizon Nexus One spec sheet, right off of Verizon’s Intranet Equipment Guide. Now, look a bit closer. About 10 bullet points down. See it? “Sense UI (User Interface)”.
For those not keeping track, Sense is HTC’s user interface mod for Android. It started off primarily as a much-needed visual overhaul, then came to include features like Flash in the browser. It’s a pretty great addition to Android – and it’s one thing that the currently available T-Mobile Nexus One is lacking.
Before getting too excited: I’d take this with the grainiest grain of salt you’ve got handy. Even if this screenshot is real (which we don’t have reason to doubt, so far), it’s quite possible that it slipped in there unintentionally. The Nexus One is very much a Google-brand phone (albeit one made by HTC), and HTC has told us all along that it won’t ever get Sense through official means.
But hey, things change, right? Perhaps Google and HTC have just gotten a bit friendlier about the rules since Apple went on the offensive against them.
Also worth noting: according to the image, the Nexus One will only be available through Google’s online store, rather than Verizon retail spots.
[Good find, Android Central!]
Section: Computers, Mobile Computers
The JooJoo, while not the iPad, is potentially one of the most interesting tablets, if only for the story behind the device. When it was the CrunchPad, it was often accused of being vaporware, and now as the JooJoo it has a lot of that to overcome. Today, however, the tablet is one step closer to being released in the US.
The JooJoo has passed through the FCC, bringing a future release closer. That in itself is good to hear, but the specs of the JooJoo are actually a bit exciting. There should be no surprise that the tablet is running the Intel Atom CPU (N270 to be specific), the good part comes in the graphics. It looks as if the JooJoo will feature the Nvidia Ion GPU, potentially even the second generation which should ship within the next few weeks. This is why the JooJoo will be able to handle HD video with no problem, though it will likely not be great for the battery life.
The FCC’s JooJoo looks to be running Windows, and not the new-and-improved UI, though that’s likely just for testing. Why anyone would want to install a desktop OS on a tablet is questionable, though its nice to know the option is there. Fusion Garage needs to do something to make the JooJoo appeal to some people over the iPad, and perhaps that’s one way to go about it.
Full Story » | Written by Shawn Ingram for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
The Apple Store was down for a short spell this morning, and it has popped back up with a pre-order page for the iPad. If you want to get your shiny new Wi-Fi Apple tablet delivered on April 3rd, you can buy it now. If you are holding out for the 3G version, you can still pre-order, but you’ll be kept waiting until the infuriatingly vague “late April”. Despite the international Apple Stores also going offline today, there is still no news of worldwide pricing.
You can also order Apple’s iPad accessories. The book-like case is $40, the iPad Keyboard Dock is $70, the regular dock is $30 and the spare mains charger is $30. In the box with the iPad you get this charger and a dock cable, but no headphones at all. Two-year Applecare for the iPad is another $100.
We wonder, with the ability to pre-order, if there will be anyone to join us in line at the real Apple Store when the Gadget Lab crew goes to buy its iPad on the morning of the 3rd. Even we aren’t going to take the chance of Apple selling out before we get there: If you know where to look, you can reserve online and pick up in store.
iPad Order page [Apple]
There are three* video games I know anything about, and all of them I played obsessively through my college years. One of those games is Streetfighter II, Capcom’s amazingly popular (and awesome) one-on-one beat’em-up. So when Streetfighter IV turned up on the App Store yesterday, I downloaded it to my iPod Touch and pretty much lost the rest of the day. Here’s a quick first look at the iPhone version of the world’s most famous fighting game.
Streetfighter IV is much more similar to the 1991 game than to the 3D SF4 you’ll find on bigger consoles (reviewed by our own Chris Kohler over at Game|Life). If you’re familiar with Guile’s charging attacks or Ryu’s Hadoken (fireball) and Hurricane Kick, you’ll be immediately at home: The moves are pulled off the same way. You also get some new, more powerful tricks, but not so many of the complex pyrotechnics of the Streetfighters between then and now.
If you liked the original, you’ll love this. But how does it play without any real buttons? Surprisingly well. There is an on-screen joystick for moving and jumping, and four on-screen buttons: punch, kick, special move and charge. You can do your special moves the old way, with joystick gestures combined with buttons, or you can wuss-out by just hitting the special move button. This will be annoying for those who had to learn the hard way, but you can switch off the auto-settings in the preferences.
There are two more ways to attack. The “revenge” and “super” meters charge as you get beaten up or as you land hits, respectively, and when they are full you can just touch them to perform some huge special moves. This makes the game sound too easy, but it isn’t: the other fighters have the same access to these moves.
You get the normal story mode, a practice room and a dojo section where you are trained to fight. But the big draw is one-on-one playing against another human. This works over bluetooth, and I couldn’t test it out due to a lack of willing opponents. I do wonder if using faster and slower devices, for instance different generations of iPod Touches, would cause problems between players.
The only problems I had were with the size of the screen. Sometimes my thumbs got in the way of the action, and sometime I got too excited and managed to hit the home button and switch the game off. I swear I was about to win, too.
For our older readers, this will be the quickest $10 they have ever spent. For everyone else, its worth the money for some fast fun. Just don’t buy it until you have finished work for the day.
Streetfighter IV [iTunes]
*The other two games? Super Mario Kart and Super Mario World, of course.
By Don Clark, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Intel Corp. (INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) are overhauling their lines of chips for server systems at a rare time–just as corporate customers’ appetite for new technology finally seems to be improving.
The new technology is expected to allow computer makers to offer significant gains in performance over prior products, the typical pattern as the chip makers race to pack more features on tiny squares of silicon. But some key strategies of the longtime rivals are diverging.
Intel, by far the biggest supplier of the electronic calculating engines for computers, wants to push the x86 technology that originated in personal computers into the biggest servers on the market.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
 Globe and Mail | IPCC Rainforest eco-tastrophe claim confirmed as bunk Register More bad news today for the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as another of its extravangant ecopocalypse predictions, sourced from green campaigners, has been confirmed as bunk by scientists. ... Scientists take another run at climate change Report: The Case for Global Warming Stronger Than Ever Global warming study gets external, independent review |
[UPDATE: It's official, although it's not clear whether the screen is touch-enabled. See the Sony video embedded below]
The folks at Geeky Gadgets have got ahold of some screenshots from Sony’s upcoming mirrorless Alpha camera. It appears that the innovation isn’t all on the outside: this camera will have a touch screen and a smart new interface to go with it.
Mirrorless cameras are becoming popular because they put big sensors in small bodies with interchangeable lenses, and Sony’s concept added typical Sony Style. But looks are nothing without a good product, and these screen shots show that Sony has decided to abstract the interface, forgetting about apertures and shutter speeds and instead focussing on their effects.
For instance, we know that opening up the lens shortens depth-of-field and throws the background out of focus, making the subject pop. Sony lets you control this by touching a button and sliding an on-screen control for “Bkground Defocus”. The menu screens are big and colorful, too, instead of the cryptic text lists we’re used to.
In fact, going by these leaked shots it looks as if there won’t be many buttons at all on this camera. Even the mode setting dial is a big on-screen graphic (shaped just like a dial!)
We love where the camera market is going, with relative newcomers forgetting about the old film ways of doing things and instead concentrating on taking better pictures more easily. More shots below, or click over to Geeky Gadgets to see them all.
Sony Ultra Compact DSLR Camera Concept Menu And LCD Screenshots [Geeky Gadgets]
The Cloak Bag is a camera bag that lets you take pictures whilst your camera is still inside. It also doesn’t look anything like a normal camera bag, making it doubly secure if you’re a vulnerable traveler on vacation.
Like all the best niche products, the shoot-through bag was born of specific need. After two near misses in Buenos Aires, co-inventor Robert Merrill was afraid to take his DSLR out for fear of theft, so when he got back to Florida, he went to work. The Cloak Bag is designed to keep the camera protected and out of site, yet you can quickly flip it open and shoot with the camera still inside. A strap replaces your actual camera strap, and then the case itself hooks onto it with Velcro and a screw in the tripod-mount. The bottom of the bag zips open and folds inside when you want to shoot. In this mode, it looks like any other shoulder bag.
To shoot, you flip open the top (held in place with magnets) and your fingers slot inside through a gap to reach the dials and shutter release. If you need to zoom of focus manually, there is another zipper to gain access to the lens from the side.
Even if not fearing pickpockets and scam-artists, I like that you can have the camera ready to go but still protected from bumps (just don’t forget the front is open and put the camera down on wet ground). And at $50, it’s not much more than other day bags. The Cloak Bag is for DSLRs-only, and will fit cameras as big as Canon’s 5D MkII and Nikon’s D700 – in short, anything smaller than a bulky pro camera.
Cloak Bag [Cloak Bags via Photography Bay]
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Solar power combined with fancy-looking cases? The perfect storm for getting an end-of-the-week mention on the Gadget Lab. Today its the turn of the Novothink Solar Surge, an iPhone and iPad Touch case with a solar panel and a lithium-ion polymer battery. Instead of just gluing some photo-sensitive panels to the back of a case, Novothink has, well, actually thought about the design.
In sunlight, the case can grab enough juice in a half-hour two-hours for 30 minutes talk time on 3G and an hour on 2G. That’s enough to make this case useful on its own, especially as outdoors is exactly the place you can’t plug in a charger. The case also has a hole for hooking onto a carabiner and hanging from a backpack — a bad idea in the city, but out in the wilderness and away from pickpockets it is ideal.
For once, the iPod Touch gets some extra love: The Touch version of the case, due to the extra space afforded by the iPod’s slim body, has a 1500mAH battery (the iPhone’s is 1320mAH). Both cases, when fully charged, will double the life of the devices. There’s even a free iPhone app to help you calculate how much sunbathing your case has to do to get you through a day. Other neat touches are the row of LEDs to tell you how much power is left and, on the inevitable cloudy days, the regular USB socket in the case means you can charge (and sync) without Apple’s custom cord.
The Apple-certified cases aren’t cheap, but for such utilitarian devices they certainly look good. The iPod Touch case is $70 (on offer right now at $53) and the iPhone version costs $80.
Surge for iPod Touch [Novothink. Thanks, Matt!]
Surge for iPhone [Novothink]
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The problem with all of these people who are walking out the door at MySpace isn’t so much the number of them, because MySpace is trying to replace them by hiring more people. It’s the fact that the best people are leaving, and taking a lot of the knowledge base with them.
I understand heightened security measures in airports and on air planes, but at some point the rules and regulations by some airlines deserve a facepalm. Take, for instance, John Battelle, who flew on a United Airlines flight enabled with Wi-Fi recently. Since it was late at night, he wanted to video chat with his children simply to say good night. When attempting to initiate a video chat with his family, a flight attendant informed him of a flight policy: video chat communication could be used by terrorists to coordinate an attack.