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Microsoft Determined To Ruin The April Fools Party
You’re like the guy who walks around at a party and suddenly blurts out: “Careful, people. The long term effects of alcohol range from possible health benefits for low levels of alcohol consumption to severe detrimental effects in cases of chronic alcohol abuse!” All that guy is going to get is heaps of blank stares and probably some offensive name-calling as soon as he turns his back. This is the digital equivalent of said behavior:
Blank. Stare. Information provided by CrunchBase      
Source: TechCrunch | 1 Apr 2010 | 4:15 am YouTube Gets a New, Less Cluttered Look - InternetNews.com
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 1 Apr 2010 | 4:09 am Music group EMI in dire straits (AP)AP - Struggling music group EMI faces being taken over by its bankers after failing to clinch a deal to sell the North American distribution rights for its artists to Universal Music Group or Sony Music.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 1 Apr 2010 | 3:48 am Ex-Bebo CEO Joanna Shields To Lead Facebook’s International Assault Facebook has been famously thin in terms of it's international organisation. Visiting their London officies recently impressed upon me how few people they actually have in Europe. A few sales staff, a PR, receptionist etc. As far as I could tell, only the affable Christian Hernandez was doing anything in wider Europe, as Facebook's international biz dev guy. So it's not before time that it's expanding its global sales organisation.
Joanna Shields has re-emerged after recently exiting from her role at AOL, as Faceboook's new VP of Sales and Business Development for EMEA. Joanna was previously CEO of Bebo and President of People Platforms at AOL.
Joanna was also the person who got advertising agencies to buy into Bebo, thus triggering it's sale to AOL. We are talking one persuasive person here.
Source: TechCrunch | 1 Apr 2010 | 3:30 am Beautiful Alice in Wonderland rings
These official Disney/Burton rings commemorate the new Alice movie -- there's also a lovely Cheshire cat-in-tree with glowing eyes and mouth!
Anéis Alice: surpreendentes (via Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)
Previously:
Source: Boing Boing | 1 Apr 2010 | 3:16 am Facebook Lands Former Bebo CEO (and ex-Googler) Joanna Shields [MediaMemo]
It’s familiar territory for her in more than one way, since she once helped Google (GOOG) manage the same geography. Shields has had a busy couple of years: Two years ago, she arranged the sale Bebo to AOL (AOL) for $850 million. A year after that, she took off, and ended up in a content startup backed by Elisabeth Murdoch’s Shine Group. It’s unclear what happened to that now less-than-shiny project. Blake Chandlee, who had been running the EMEA group, is getting moved out of that job and will now run sales in emerging markets–Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America. This is the second high-profile hire–and of a former Googler–by the social networking site recently. Last week, Facebook hired top-ranking Google ad exec David Fischer as its VP of Advertising and Global Operations. As well as Fischer and COO Sheryl Sandberg–who has been eyeing Shields as a possible Facebook recruit since she left AOL–it seems an Ex-Googleplex is forming at Facebook’s new HQ in Palo Alto, Calif. Some of the many former Googlers include: Elliot Schrage, who is VP of Global Communications, Marketing and Public Policy; Grady Burnett, who heads its online and inside sales; Don Faul, director of global online operations; and Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook Developer Network. Source: All Things Digital | 1 Apr 2010 | 3:06 am Eric Leonard Joins EoPlex Technologies as Director of Sales & MarketingSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 1 Apr 2010 | 3:00 am AZZ incorporated Reports Results for the Fourth Quarter and Fiscal-Year 2010, Signs Agreement to Acquire North American Galvanizing, and Dividend DeclaredSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 1 Apr 2010 | 3:00 am Job Market Showing Gradual Improvement, According to Quarterly Job Forecast From CareerBuilder and USA TODAYSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 1 Apr 2010 | 3:00 am Eric Leonard Joins EoPlex Technologies as Director of Sales & MarketingREDWOOD CITY, Calif., April 1 /PRNewswire/ -- EoPlex Technologies, the company that produces complex electronic components in a high-speed, low-cost, clean tech, print forming process, announced today that Eric Leonard as joined the company as Director of Sales and Marketing.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 1 Apr 2010 | 3:00 am State Budget Cuts, Now and ThenSource: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Apr 2010 | 2:51 am Open Forum: What Big Second Life Events Are Coming Up This Weekend?Sad to say, but due to some real world interruptions, Ms. Chestnut Rau will not be able to publish her much-loved Second Life event calendar today, as she usually does every Thursday. (And notwithstanding...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Apr 2010 | 2:44 am Scientists Say Toads Can Predict Earthquakesreillymj writes "Researchers claim toads sensed a severe earthquake last year five days before it hit. Last spring's L'Aquila earthquake devastated the medieval city of the same name in Italy. Five days earlier, a group of biologists noticed some toads behaving strangely in a pond nearby that would later be the quake's epicenter."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Gizmodo | 1 Apr 2010 | 2:36 am First Look: Apple iPad - Washington Post
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 1 Apr 2010 | 2:20 am NWN in Japanese: (Cross the Chasm)Web2.0Grace Mc...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Apr 2010 | 2:19 am VASCO's aXsGUARD Gatekeeper Offers PKI and SSL-VPN Client SupportOAKBROOK TERRACE, Ill. and ZURICH, April 1 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- VASCO Data Security Inc.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 1 Apr 2010 | 2:10 am VASCO's aXsGUARD Gatekeeper Offers PKI and SSL-VPN Client SupportSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 1 Apr 2010 | 2:10 am Topeka? Come On Google, You Can Do Better
And Google takes April Fools very seriously. They launched Gmail on April 1, 2004, which is totally meta. And there are so many good Google jokes from April Fools past: Google Paper, Google TiSP, and Google Romance were all winners. One Google joke even erupted into a minor Wikipedia war over time travel. Google Topeka? Not so funny. They’ve changed their logo on the Google homepage to Topeka and give this link as an explanation. They’ve changed their corporate name, they say, to Topeka for the day. The problem is the whole joke is really just a way to promote Google’s experimental fiber network. 1,100 cities are begging to be part of the program and doing crazy things, like renaming their city name to Google, to get picked.
Anyway, if you’re promoting your own stuff on April Fools you need to be extra funny. This isn’t extra funny. And what happened to Google Jail? As far as I can tell it remains unannounced. Maybe they got mad that Fast Company scooped them on their own joke. Or maybe someone at Google decided it was a bad idea to mock the horrific prison situation here in the U.S. We’re grading this one an “D-” on our list of 2010 April Fools jokes. I need Google to go back to basics and get April Fools right again. This is too important not to do it right.      
Source: TechCrunch | 1 Apr 2010 | 2:02 am Forget Apps, Text Still Reigns in MobileBeware of the hype surrounding mobile apps, it's a booming market for sure, but text messaging still rules, continuing to deliver impressive year-over-year growth across all demographic groups. AdWeek...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Apr 2010 | 1:47 am Premium HDMI Cables: More Of A Ripoff Than You ThinkBy Evan Ackerman A couple years ago, we posted about some self-described “audiophiles” who pitted premium Monster Cables against soldered coat hangers to see if there was any audible difference...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Apr 2010 | 1:24 am Chinese Police Smash Mobile Phone Smuggling Ring (PC World)PC World - Chinese police have smashed a mobile phone smuggling ring that involved up to 160 people and was worth over 7.8 billion yuan (US$1.1 billion), state media said late Wednesday.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 1 Apr 2010 | 1:20 am Apple IPad Reviewedadeelarshad82 writes "Since iPad's initial introduction back in January, many of us still wonder why we should drop hundreds of dollars for what is termed as a large iPod. Missing features like support for multitasking, a built-in camera for video chats, and Flash support in Safari only add to the dilemma. However, a recently published review for the iPad starts to clear up these doubts. To begin with, the iPad is packing some real quality gear under the hood. Even though the in-house-designed 1GHz A4 chip got little official comments from Apple; touch screen's instantaneous responses prove that it is outstandingly fast. Furthermore, the iPad runs iPhone OS 3.2, and is currently the only device that runs this version of the operating system. iPad's graphics capabilities come from a PowerVR SGX GPU, similar to the one found in the iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch. It can render about 28 million polygons/second, which is more powerful than the Qualcomm Snapdragon found in devices like the HTC HD2. Also, iPad's extraordinary battery life is not just a myth. According to the lab tests, battery netted a respectable 9 hours and 25 minutes, very close to Apple's claims of 10 hours."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Gizmodo | 1 Apr 2010 | 1:11 am Special Report: iPad striptease: It's what's inside that counts (Reuters)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 1 Apr 2010 | 1:10 am UK regulator calls for cut in mobile phone charge
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 ABC Online | 'Climategate' panel in London issues mixed report Washington Post In the first official report on the scandal that some have dubbed Climategate, a parliamentary panel sharply criticized a British university Wednesday for what it said was a culture of withholding information, but it added that the integrity of the ... Old Science Caught in New Media Whirlwind UK Parliament clears climatologists, calls for more openness Climate science must be more open, say MPs |
Kingdom Kim's Culinary Outposts (via Kottke)Aside from small North Korean flags pinned to the waitresses' blouses, the restaurant is surprisingly free from overt propagandizing. Instead of paeans to the Great Leader and his revolutionary juche ideology, the walls are adorned with a series of monumental landscape paintings. One crashing seascape, rendered in an apocalyptic palette of blues, greens, and reds, recalls the painting used as a backdrop to the official photo of Kim Jong-il and Bill Clinton that was taken during Clinton's visit to Pyongyang in August. The cold flood-lighting and no-camera policy (often violated on the sly by curious Western expats) also lend an Orwellian tinge to an evening at Pyongyang, though the authoritarian mood is often broken by the sound of drunken South Korean businessmen warbling their way through the restaurant's thick karaoke catalog...
In 2006 and 2007, Daily NK reported several incidents in which waitresses from North Korean restaurants in China's Shandong and Jilin provinces tried to defect, forcing the closure of the operations. Kim Myung Ho added that two or three DPRK security agents live onsite at each restaurant to "regulate" the workers and that any attempts at flight result in the immediate repatriation of the entire staff.
(Image: Slate)
These mousepads are made of 1/8″ rolled steel, and the larger ones weigh four pounds. Take one to a LAN party; if you get owned, just start rage-bludgeoning! Every one is hand-made, and they claim the finishing method they use is perfect for laser-based mice. Sure! Hell, I’ll believe anything they say, because anyone who makes things out of solid steel is A-OK in my book.
They’re made by Greensforged, and there are several varieties. Are you a gravity gun whore in HL2DM? You’ll be wanting the Ravenholm. Are you a giant? Get the Hugepad. At $30-$50, they’re a bit more expensive than the average mousepad, but hey, the Vespula costs $35 and it’s not even close to solid steel!
[via Metafilter/MeFi Projects]
"Having been a senior executive at some of America's largest corporations I am convinced that model is ultimately doomed. An entity that lasts forever and grows forever is just not possible and is silly anyway. It is a waste of resources. Society deserves a better model for the organization and deployment of resources to provide products and services. Scale is still important. Companies like Cisco have shown how to continue to innovate by acquisition, but the big question is how do corporations gracefully end? How can we break the cycle of Wall Street, a strong financial services industry is simply not good for society. Wall Street does not improve productivity, the model is parasitic, transferring huge resources out of the system. I am looking forward to the next phase of the industrial revolution." - Glen Edens, former senior vice president and director at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, chief scientist Hewlett PackardThe Impact of the Internet on Institutions in the Future | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project
For the past several months, I’ve given WolframAlpha a hard time. I actually think the service is pretty cool, I just think they drastically overpriced their iPhone app. The computational engine was trying to get users to pay $50 for the information they could access for free online. Sure, there’s something to be said for an iPhone-tailored experience, but $50 was just ridiculous. And guess who now agrees? WolframAlpha.
The service has slashed — and I do mean slashed — the price of the app from $49.99 all the way down to $1.99. Yes, they’ve discounted it $48. That’s a 96% price reduction. And not just that — they’re offering a refund to anyone who did pay the ridiculous price for the app. Yes, a full refund — and Apple is keeping their 30%, so WolframAlpha is losing money by doing this.
Between the $49.99 version and the $19.99 discounted version that was on sale during the holidays, 10,000 copies of the app were sold, we’re told. That’s not awful, but it’s nowhere near the number WolframAlpha needs to be ubiquitous. And that’s exactly what WolframAlpha has decided it wants to be.
The $1.99 price will certainly help towards that goal, but so will the reinstatement of the mobile-optimized version of the site. You may recall that WolframAlpha took that version away in December, erroneously thinking people would buy the $50 app without it. Now, it’s back too.
More changes to make WolframAlpha appeal to all sorts of people will be coming too, we’re told.
For now, check out the handsomely-priced $1.99 app.
The early reviews for the iPad are in, and they’re certainly going to make Steve Jobs happy.
Apple handed out iPads to a few select publications a couple of days early, and the critical consensus is overwhelmingly positive.
The usual reviewers from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, as well as a few surprising newcomers to the Apple early reviews circuit, all praised the iPad for its epically long battery life (over 12 hours), impressive speed and beautiful touchscreen.
Priced between $500 and $830, the iPad is hitting stores Saturday.
Excerpts from the eight early reviews are as follows:
Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal:
I believe this beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly, and to challenge the primacy of the laptop. It could even help, eventually, to propel the finger-driven, multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface that has prevailed for decades.
….
All in all, however, the iPad is an advance in making more-sophisticated computing possible via a simple touch interface on a slender, light device. Only time will tell if it’s a real challenger to the laptop and netbook.
David Pogue, The New York Times:
And the techies are right about another thing: the iPad is not a laptop. It’s not nearly as good for creating stuff. On the other hand, it’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it — books, music, video, photos, Web, e-mail and so on. For most people, manipulating these digital materials directly by touching them is a completely new experience — and a deeply satisfying one.
Andy Inhatko, Chicago Sun Times:
In fact, after a week with the iPad, I’m suddenly wondering if any other company is as committed to invention as Apple. Has any other company ever demonstrated a restlessness to stray from the safe and proven, and actually invent things?
Ed Baig, USA Today:
The first iPad is a winner. It stacks up as a formidable electronic-reader rival for Amazon’s Kindle. It gives portable game machines from Nintendo and Sony a run for their money. At the very least, the iPad will likely drum up mass-market interest in tablet computing in ways that longtime tablet visionary and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates could only dream of.
Tim Gideon, PCMag.com:
Aside from Apple enthusiasts, many of us wondered who would drop hundreds of dollars for this not-quite-computer. But having used the iPad for some time, I can tell you that the device just makes sense. When you combine basic-but-essential work tools with iWork, an improved browser, e-mail, iPod, and photo applications, a well-executed e-Book platform with iBooks, and throw in thousands of downloadable apps and games, and package it all in a gorgeous, slim slate with a beautiful 9.7-inch touch screen, you have yourself a winner.
Bob LeVitus, Houston Chronicle:
It turns out the iPad isn’t as much a laptop replacement as I thought (though it could easily be used as one). Instead, it’s an entirely new category of mobile device. For example, now when I want to surf the Web from the couch or back deck, the iPad is the device I choose. Starbucks? Same thing. Think of the iPad as a new arrow in your technology quiver, an arrow that will often be the best tool for a given task.
Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing:
Just as the iPhone, Palm Pré and Android phones scratched an itch we didn’t know we had—somewhere between cellphone and notebook—the iPad hits a completely new pleasure spot. The display is large enough to make the experience of apps and games on smaller screens stale. Typography is crisp, images gem-like, and the speed brisk thanks to Apple’s A4 chip and solid state storage. As I browse early release iPad apps, web pages, and flip through the iBook store and books, the thought hits that this is a greater leap into a new user experience than the sum of its parts suggests.
Omar Wasow, TheRoot.com:
The techie obsession with specs and obscure features completely misses how most consumers will actually use the iPad. A small percentage of power users will be disappointed that the iPad doesn’t, say, have an HDMI video-out port or that it currently lacks the ability to run multiple applications simultaneously or that it fails to address some other esoteric concern. The rest of us (even most techies) will be thrilled that doing what we want to do on the iPad is generally effortless.
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
It strikes you when you first touch an iPad. The form just feels good, not too lightweight or heavy, nor too thin or thick. It's sensual. It's tactile. And that moment is a good way to spot a first-timer, too, as I observed with a few test subjects. The dead giveaway for an iPad n00b is a pause, a few breaths before hitting the "on" switch, just letting it rest against the skin.
Flick the switch and the novelty hits. Just as the iPhone, Palm Pré and Android phones scratched an itch we didn't know we had—somewhere between cellphone and notebook—the iPad hits a completely new pleasure spot. The display is large enough to make the experience of apps and games on smaller screens stale. Typography is crisp, images gem-like, and the speed brisk thanks to Apple's A4 chip and solid state storage. As I browse early release iPad apps, web pages, and flip through the iBook store and books, the thought hits that this is a greater leap into a new user experience than the sum of its parts suggests.Remember The Periodic Table of Elements series of books we featured here at Boing Boing? There's an iPad version ($13.99 in the app store, screenshots here), and it's dazzling — it makes science feel like magic in your hands. I called the guy behind The Elements, Theo Gray, and asked him to put into words the UI magic that iPad makes possible for creators of books, games, news, and productivity tools.
"The Elements on iPad is not a game, not an app, not a TV show. It's a book. But it's Harry Potter's book. This is the version you check out from the Hogwarts library. Everything in it is alive in some way."
Indeed, the elements in this periodic table seem very much alive. The obvious way to examine static objects — say, a lump of gold (number 79) or an ingot of cast antimony (number 51) is to rotate them, to spin the specimen with your fingertips. And that's exactly what you do here. You can view them in 3D if you wish, with 3D glasses you buy separately online. Tap here, and live data from Wolfram Alpha pops up (the thermodynamic properties of molybednum, perhaps, or the current price of platinum). Some elements are presented with little video clips you can play, too.
When you get a chance, compare it to the tiny screen of an iPhone or Droid, or the less responsive touchscreens of an all-in-one desktop PC such as HP's TouchSmart: it's a completely different experience.
"A stereo 3D video of a static object that you can rotate in real time," Theo says over the phone. "Honestly, I'm not sure where you go from there. Smellovision? Not a whole lot more you can do."
The Elements presentation for iPad (those spinning samples of elements you twirl with your fingertip) makes use of openGL textures, compressing visual data in a way that can be compressed in the graphics chip, so the data can be read without hogging CPU resources. By making use of hardware native to iPad, you can can "play" a spin forwards and backwards with no hiccups or performance lags -- even spin 3, 4, 5, 10 views of an element at a time. This ain't Flash video over WiFi, folks. You'll feel sad going back to chokey http embeds.
Each app for iPad can't be more than 2 gigs in compressed archive form (a limitation imposed by the zip compression standard at work here, not something of Apple's own design). Data-dense applications like The Elements buck right up against that limit, but future iterations (this and others that go live Saturday were developed with great haste) will likely take advantage of the ability to do background downloading to supplement data.
Tapping and swirling my way through iBooks (the store includes free, public domain titles in addition to the $9.99-$12.99 bestsellers), and iPad native apps provided at launch such as the spectacular, game-changing Marvel Comics app (crisp, lucid art, the ability to navigate frame-by-frame, rendering spoilers down the page obsolete), the Epicurious recipe browser, and the news browsing app by Reuters (free app in which video is, again, a seamless delight), the idea hits. This is what we wanted e-books to be all along. Rich, nimble, and dense with image and sound and navigability, right there inside the flow of the story. And this is what we wanted the web to feel like all along. We just want it to work, and we don't want to be aware of the delivery method while we're enjoying what's delivered.
Theo's been thinking about all of this, too. "The Kindle is a great device, and I own several," Theo says. "But the concept of an e-book has always been that it's like PDF. Imagine if the web standard was PDF instead of html, if everyone's web pages consisted of what you can do in PDF? That would be a really boring world. I hate to see ebooks as being pigeonholed as these static, PDFlike things, in which the biggest 'a-ha' you can have is an exciting pageturning animation, or search. What could an ebook be? Let's draw a line in the sand out in the future and say, this is the greatest aspiration, if the limitations of code and hardware were no object."
Draw that imaginary line in the sand, and you've sketched out iPad.
Manic, nonstop use revealed a number of things: battery life is better than I anticipated. I got a full day of constant internet-connected use (it did not leave my hands) on one charge. More than 12 hours, with heavy video and gaming, and screen cranked up to full brightness.
Orientation lock is great for when I'm sharing YouTube clips on the couch with family, or web browsing in bed. It fits well in my lap for tweeting when eating during lunch break, and it's easy to wipe off a stray mayo glop and get right back to updating the world on the details of my sandwich (using Twitterific for iPad, a free app which does what it promises on the tin). When we began developing the Boing Boing iPad presentation, we used a simulator and tapped into a lot of jQuery, thinking that snazzy transitional animations would delight. They didn't: it worked great on the Mac simulator, but were sluggish on iPad, so we aborted and went simple. When you're redesigning a site for iPad, you start to think in terms of a visually rich 'zine, not a website. Given Boing Boing's 'zine roots (25 years and counting since the first Xeroxed copy), the close of that evolutionary circle is something that makes me smile.
Familiar Mac fundamentals like Calendar, Keynote, Pages, and Numbers are presented thoughtfully with the kinetic and tactile specifics of iPad in mind. Pinch-zoom the preview image for a photo album you've saved, and watch the contents scatter out accross the screen, so you can be reminded of the shots you've stored inside.
Gaming possibilities are profound. Accelerometer-driven games like the Real Racing HD iPad app ($9.99) available at first release thrill in a new way, like when I first held a Wii. There's something about tilting and steering and braking with a device you hold in your hands, just like a steering wheel, that's so much more viscerally pleasing than a big old shelf-bound console.
The on-screen QWERTY keyboard is more finger-sized than iPhone (obviously, the screen's larger when either in portrait or landscape) but I didn't find myself using the device for lots of text input (email, blog post composing) without the aid of the keyboard dock— pretty much exactly like the standard Mac keyboard. No, there's no camera, but it doesn't seem like as much of a big deal as when I heard that news back at the January unveiling. iPad is more about experiencing media, and light sharing, than heavy-duty media production.
That said, I can imagine traveling with iPad instead of a netbook, with that keyboard dock in tow if I really need to do heavy text input.
Maybe the most exciting thing about iPad is the apps that aren't here yet. The book-film-game hybrid someone will bust out in a year, redefining the experience of each, and suggesting some new nouns and verbs in the process. Or an augmented reality lens from NASA that lets you hold the thing up to the sky and pinpoint where the ISS is, next to what constellation, read the names and see the faces of the crew members, check how those fuel cells are holding up.
I like it a lot. But it's the things I never knew it made possible — to be revealed or not in the coming months — that will determine whether I love it.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hulu turned two years old a few weeks ago. And now it wants to throw itself a party, in the form of positive PR.
The joint venture video site — owned by News Corp.’s Fox (NWS) , GE’s NBC (GE) Disney’s ABC (DIS) and with Providence Equity Partners — hasn’t uttered a peep about its financials until this week. But now it wants the world to know it is making a profit, and that ad sales are booming.
Hulu says it generated “over” $100 million in revenue last year, and turned a profit in the last quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010. The company says it will pass the $100 million figure by the middle of this year.
That revenue total is a gross number, so you can subtract more than half of that off the top. That’s because Hulu gives anywhere from 50 percent to 70 percent of all ad sales to its content partners who supply its programming. And bear in mind that the company is footing the bill for at least a billion video streams a month.
But I double-checked with the company, and when it says “profitable”, it means “profitable,” as in, net income after all expenses, taxes, depreciation, etc.
So even if the number isn’t huge, a profit is well worth bragging about, because I can’t think of another Web video company that has claimed one so far. And that includes Google’s YouTube (GOOG), for the time being.
What put Hulu over the hump? Getting CEO Jason Kilar to say anything of interest about his company is pretty much a futile exercise, but I tried anyway, and got this response: “We’re a distribution business. And a lot of that is a function of how you manage your business, and getting scale, and we’ve been very fortunate to achieve both.”
And that’s about as candid as Kilar gets in public.
The downside for Kilar is that his network owners still aren’t entirely comfortable with the company’s model, and are worried that all the free programming that Hulu offers cuts into their existing businesses. Hence the push for a subscription plan, which as I reported in February will include an app for Apple’s iPad (AAPL). More on that later.
 Geeky gadgets | Read all 'OS 4.0' posts in Crave CNET The Palm Pre uses a "card" view for switching between apps. iPhone users may not be so lucky. As we noted previously, multitasking refers to an operating system's ability to run multiple programs (in this case apps) simultaneously and ... iPhone OS 4.0 Said to Support Expose-Like Multitasking New iPhone OS 4.0 will bring multitasking support IPhone HD Likely to Air June 22; Hardware, Multitasking Detailed in Reports |
Time to live blog April Fools 2010! Some of us got a jump start on the time-honored tradition (not to name any names here), but we still have about 24 hours of shenanigans left. As the new hire, I have the dubious honor of managing the TechCrunch April Fool’s Scorecard.
If you spot a good one please leave it in the comments. I can’t promise you a TechCrunch T-shirt, but I may get to keep my job. Here’s the definitive list of 2010 April Fools jokes. We’ll update it regularly over the next 24 hours.
 Washington Post | Google: Online attacks aimed at Vietnam's critics The Associated Press HANOI, Vietnam — Google Inc. accused Vietnam on Wednesday of stifling political dissent with cyberattacks, the latest complaint by the Internet giant against a communist regime following a public dispute with China over online censorship. ... Vietnamese dissidents targeted by botnet attacks Google: Malware Attack Targets Vietnamese Mining Opposition Sahit Muja: China's attacks on Google and US businesses is dangerous. |
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Section: Audio, Portable Audio, Video, Portable Video
Microsoft has confirmed that a 64 GB version of its Zune HD MP3 player is on the way. The latest device will double the Zune’s previous highest storage capacity and cost $349.99. Interested? Well, get your checkbook ready because the Zune HD 64GB is set to debut April 12 at ZuneOriginals.com.
In addition to announcing the new Zune, which comes in multiple color choices, Microsoft has taken a few bucks off the 16GB and 32GB models of the Zune HD. The 16GB has been reduced to $199.99 and the 32GB model has been slashed $269.99. That could lead to even bigger discounts if third party retailers like Amazon decide to give consumers an even bigger break on the Zune.
Of course, all this is no surprise. We already reported on Monday that an HD 64 model was spotted online before the page quickly went down. Now we’ve got official word and a decision to make if you’re someone in the market for a new MP3 player.
Full Story » | Written by Andrew Kameka for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Looking for more ways to go green? Powerplus just introduced the Leopard, a solar-powered universal remote that can charge its internal lithium-ion battery using either direct sunlight or artificial light. Basically, if you keep it facing up in a lit room, you will never have to worry about running out of batteries again. The dimensions on this remote are pretty standard (7.3in x 1.9in x 0.7in) and weighs 76g.
As far as aesthetics go, I have to admit there are better options—such as this $50 Logitech Harmony we wrote about recently. But at £9.99 a pop, what do you have to lose? Unfortunately, most people reading this blog probably switch TV sets before they ever need to change the batteries on their remote.
 Times Online | Large Hadron Collider rewards scientists watching at Caltech Los Angeles Times The proton beams collide at a total energy level of 7 trillion electron volts hours after a few attempts at the test site near Geneva. Scientists begin examining the data. The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva succeeded early Tuesday in smashing ... Science in the public view: A good gamble CERN tackles glitches, pushes new science frontier DIMENSIONAL PORTAL INCURSION AT THE LHC! |
The first iPad reviews, from tech grand-daddies David Pogue and Walt Mossberg among others, are live. Go read. Don’t have the patience? Shame on you, and TL;DR follows.
Pogue says it’s no laptop replacement, but as a giant iPod touch, it’s a huge success. Mossberg says he enjoys doing most tasks on it much more than on his laptop, and considers it 80% a laptop replacement. Pogue hates the keyboard, Mossberg likes it. Both found the battery life to be exceptional — over the quoted 10 hours in both cases, which surprises me hugely. We talked about the iPad’s potential and competitors in today’s podcast, and the consensus was that, as both reviews stress, the flagship apps are the real indicator of the device class’s potential.
The first iPad reviews, from tech grand-daddies David Pogue and Walt Mossberg among others, are live. Go read. Don’t have the patience? Shame on you, and TL;DR follows.
Pogue says it’s no laptop replacement, but as a giant iPod touch, it’s a huge success. Mossberg says he enjoys doing most tasks on it much more than on his laptop, and considers it 80% a laptop replacement. Pogue hates the keyboard, Mossberg likes it. Both found the battery life to be exceptional — over the quoted 10 hours in both cases, which surprises me hugely. We talked about the iPad’s potential and competitors in today’s podcast, and the consensus was that, as both reviews stress, the flagship apps are the real indicator of the device class’s potential.
PC Magazine and USA Today also weigh in, and are similarly positive. Among PC Mag’s cons is the fact that earbuds are not included. Really now. Xeni has one over at BoingBoing, and she likes it so much she shot pictures of it with a soft focus filter — my mistake, it’s probably just an iPhone camera.
I notice there are few complaints about the lack of Flash support. That’s something that will emerge in time, I think — when a hundred thousand people start cruising the net and find that quite a few of their favorite sites have a few bits missing. Will they complain or merely shrug? We’ll soon find out. The whole Apple/Flash thing is a powderkeg, of course, so I’m just going to let the consumers decide.
But the best review came from Modern Family where the iPad was a major player in the story.
We’ll have our review as soon as possible. With any luck we’ll be able to throw a few of the newest apps at it as well. And my advice is, as always, to get the thing in your hands if you’re not sure. A quick trip to the Apple Store could save you (or make you part with) quite a lot of money.
And Stephen Fry go one, as well, but he’s nice about it.
[image: Reuters]
A handful of iPad reviews published online moments ago and they’re largely positive–with some expected caveats about its lack of a camera and support for Flash and multitasking. Consensus seems to be that Apple (AAPL) has a great shot at creating a new category of device with the iPad.
Interestingly, a number of reviews make special mention of its speed (Walt Mossberg describes it as “wicked fast”), a battery life that exceeds Apple’s claims (David Pogue says the battery on his review device lasted 12 hours on a single charge–two hours more than Apple promised), and Apple’s hopes for 1,000 specially designed iPad apps to be available by launch this Saturday.
Below, excerpts from seven of those early reviews.
I believe this beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly, and to challenge the primacy of the laptop. It could even help, eventually, to propel the finger-driven, multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface that has prevailed for decades. But first, it will have to prove that it really can replace the laptop or netbook for enough common tasks, enough of the time, to make it a viable alternative.
The first iPad is a winner. It stacks up as a formidable electronic-reader rival for Amazon’s Kindle. It gives portable game machines from Nintendo and Sony a run for their money. At the very least, the iPad will likely drum up mass-market interest in tablet computing in ways that longtime tablet visionary and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates could only dream of.
No company can generate as much hype around a product launch as Apple. But that’s perfectly OK because no company is also nearly as successful at producing a new product that can justify almost any level of excitement that precedes it. They don’t do it with every product launch, but bloody hell: they’ve done it with the iPad….The most compelling sign that Apple got this right is the fact that despite the novelty of the iPad, the excitement slips away after about ten seconds and you’re completely focused on the task at hand…whether it’s reading a book, writing a report, or working on clearing your Inbox. Second most compelling: in situation after situation, I find that the iPad is the best computer in my household and office menagerie. It’s not a replacement for my notebook, mind you. It feels more as if the iPad is filling a gap that’s existed for quite some time.
The techies are right about another thing: the iPad is not a laptop. It’s not nearly as good for creating stuff. On the other hand, it’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it–books, music, video, photos, Web, e-mail and so on. For most people, manipulating these digital materials directly by touching them is a completely new experience–and a deeply satisfying one. The bottom line is that the iPad has been designed and built by a bunch of perfectionists. If you like the concept, you’ll love the machine. The only question is: Do you like the concept?
Is the iPad a perfect product? No. And the omissions will give the anti-Apple crowd plenty of ammo. Why do I need this extra device that’s not a full-fledged laptop? Where’s the camera? What about Flash? Um, how about multitasking? These are all valid complaints, but one thing I can say about most Apple products, and certainly the iPad: There may be things it doesn’t do, but what it does do, it does remarkably well. Aside from the aforementioned limitations, there isn’t a lot else to gripe about. And to my great surprise, you can actually get real work done with the iPad.
Manic, nonstop use revealed a number of things: battery life is better than I anticipated. I got a full day of constant internet-connected use (it barely left my hands) on one charge. It fits well in my lap when eating, and it’s easy to wipe off stray noodles and arugula leaves and get right back to Twittering….I like it a lot. But it’s the things I never knew it made possible–to be revealed or not in the coming months–that will determine whether I love it.
It turns out the iPad isn’t as much a laptop replacement as I thought (though it could easily be used as one). Instead, it’s an entirely new category of mobile device. For example, now when I want to surf the Web from the couch or back deck, the iPad is the device I choose. Starbucks? Same thing. Think of the iPad as a new arrow in your technology quiver, an arrow that will often be the best tool for a given task. I had high expectations for the iPad, and it has met or exceeded most of them.
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For the past week or so, I have been testing a sleek, light, silver-and-black tablet computer called an iPad. After spending hours and hours with it, I believe this beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly, and to challenge the primacy of the laptop. It could even help, eventually, to propel the finger-driven, multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface that has prevailed for decades.
But first, it will have to prove that it really can replace the laptop or netbook for enough common tasks, enough of the time, to make it a viable alternative. And that may not be easy, because previous tablet computers have failed to catch on in the mass market, and the iPad lacks some of the features—such as a physical keyboard, a Webcam, USB ports and multitasking—that most laptop or netbook users have come to expect.
If people see the iPad mainly as an extra device to carry around, it will likely have limited appeal. If, however, they see it as a way to replace heavier, bulkier computers much of the time—for Web surfing, email, social-networking, video- and photo-viewing, gaming, music and even some light content creation—it could be a game changer the way Apple’s iPhone has been.
The iPad is much more than an e-book or digital periodical reader, though it does those tasks brilliantly, better in my view than the Amazon Kindle. And it’s far more than just a big iPhone, even though it uses the same easy-to-master interface, and Apple (AAPL) says it runs nearly all of the 150,000 apps that work on the iPhone.
It’s qualitatively different, a whole new type of computer that, through a simple interface, can run more-sophisticated, PC-like software than a phone does, and whose large screen allows much more functionality when compared with a phone’s. But, because the iPad is a new type of computer, you have to feel it, to use it, to fully understand it and decide if it is for you, or whether, say, a netbook might do better.
So I’ve been using my test iPad heavily day and night, instead of my trusty laptops most of the time. As I got deeper into it, I found the iPad a pleasure to use, and had less and less interest in cracking open my heavier ThinkPad or MacBook. I probably used the laptops about 20% as often as normal, reserving them mainly for writing or editing longer documents, or viewing Web videos in Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash technology, which the iPad doesn’t support, despite its wide popularity online.
My verdict is that, while it has compromises and drawbacks, the iPad can indeed replace a laptop for most data communication, content consumption and even limited content creation, a lot of the time. But it all depends on how you use your computer.
If you’re mainly a Web surfer, note-taker, social-networker and emailer, and a consumer of photos, videos, books, periodicals and music—this could be for you. If you need to create or edit giant spreadsheets or long documents, or you have elaborate systems for organizing email, or need to perform video chats, the iPad isn’t going to cut it as your go-to device.
The iPad is thinner and lighter than any netbook or laptop I’ve seen. It weighs just 1.5 pounds, and its aluminum and glass body is a mere half-inch thick. It boasts a big, bright color 9.7-inch screen that occupies most of the front. As on all Apple portable devices, the battery is sealed in and nonreplaceable. It has a decent speaker, and even a tiny microphone.
Memory, also sealed in and nonexpandable, ranges from 16 gigabytes to 64 gigabytes. And you can order one with just a Wi-Fi wireless connection to the Internet, or Wi-Fi plus an AT&T (T) 3G cellular connection. The Wi-Fi models will be available Saturday and the 3G models, which I didn’t test, about a month later.
Prices start at $499 and go to $829, with the costlier models having more memory and/or 3G. The cellular models don’t require a contract or termination fee. You can pay AT&T either $15 a month for 250 megabytes of data use, or $30 a month for unlimited data—a significant reduction from typical prices for laptop cellular connectivity.
I was impressed with the iPad’s battery life, which I found to be even longer than Apple’s ten-hour claim, and far longer than on my laptops or smart phones. For my battery test, I played movies, TV shows and other videos back-to-back until the iPad died. This stressed the device’s most power-hogging feature, its screen. The iPad lasted 11 hours and 28 minutes, about 15% more than Apple claimed. I was able to watch four feature-length movies, four TV episodes and a video of a 90-minute corporate presentation, before the battery died midway through an episode of “The Closer.”
Walt’s mountain-view wallpaper with app icons arranged during his tests.
Oh, and all the while during this battery marathon, I kept the Wi-Fi network running and the email downloading constantly in the background. Your mileage may vary, but with Wi-Fi off and the screen turned down from the fairly bright level I used, you might even do better. Music plays far longer with the screen off. On the other hand, playing games constantly might yield worse battery life.
Apple says video playback, Web use and book reading all take about the same amount of juice. When I was doing the latter two tasks for an hour or two at a time, the battery ran down so slowly for me that I stopped thinking about it.
I also was impressed with the overall speed of the iPad. Apple’s custom processor makes it wicked fast. Screens appear almost instantly, and the Wi-Fi in my home tested as fast as it does on a laptop.
I found email easy and productive to use, and had no trouble typing accurately and quickly on the iPad’s wide on-screen keyboard. In fact, I found the iPad virtual keyboard more comfortable and accurate to use than the cramped keyboards and touchpads on many netbooks, though some fast touch typists might disagree. Apple’s $39 iPad case, which bends to set up a nice angle for typing, helps.
The Web browser also works beautifully, and takes advantage of the big screen to show full pages and cut down on scrolling. It even now has a bookmarks bar at the top. As noted, however, it doesn’t support Adobe’s Flash technology.
I also was able to easily sync the iPad’s calendar and contacts apps with Google (GOOG) and Apple’s MobileMe.
Watching videos, viewing photos, listening to music, reading books and playing games was satisfying and fun. I used the device heavily for Twitter and Facebook. And I even got some light work done in the optional iPad word processor, called Pages, which is part of a $30 suite that also includes a spreadsheet and presentation program.
This is a serious content creation app that should help the iPad compete with laptops and can import Microsoft Office files. However, only the word processor exports to Microsoft’s formats, and not always accurately. In one case, the exported Word file had misaligned text. When I then tried exporting the document as a PDF file, it was unreadable.
The iPad can run two types of third-party apps, both available from Apple’s app store. It can use nearly all existing iPhone apps. These can either run in a small, iPhone-size window in the middle of the screen, which makes them look tiny, or blown up to double size. The larger size makes them fill the screen, but can make type inside them look blocky. Still, the dozens I tested all worked properly. And it can run a new class of specially designed iPad apps, of which Apple hopes to have 1,000 at launch. I successfully tested the revamped App Store, which features the iPad apps most prominently when you’re on an iPad.
Based on my very small sample, some app developers may be testing higher prices for iPad apps than the 99 cents or $1.99 typical for paid iPhone apps. The paid iPad apps I saw ranged from $3.99 to $49.99. Others were free.
Apple has rebuilt its own core iPhone apps for the iPad to add sophisticated features that make the programs look and work more like PC or Mac software. For instance, there are “popover” menus that make it easier to make choices without leaving the screen you’re on. And, when the iPad is held horizontally, in landscape mode, as I often preferred to use it, many programs now have two panels, making them faster and more useful. For example, in email, a left-hand panel shows your message list, while a larger right-hand panel shows the message itself.
The photo app is striking, and much more like the one on the Mac than the one on the iPhone. The device can even be used as a digital picture frame. The iPod app is beautiful, too, as are the calendar and contacts app. Unfortunately, Apple excluded some of the more familiar apps from the iPhone, including Weather, Clock and Stocks.
I tested a small selection of the new third-party iPad apps Apple hopes to have available at launch, and most were also rich and feature-filled, beyond what iPhone apps offer. These included games such as Scrabble and “Touch Hockey,” a database app, news services and more.
I was able to try a pre-release version of The Wall Street Journal’s new iPad app (which I had nothing to do with designing), and found it gorgeous and highly functional—by far the best implementation of the newspaper I have ever seen on a screen. Unlike the Journal’s Web site, or its smart-phone apps, the iPad version blends much more of the look and feel of the print paper into the electronic environment. Other newspapers and magazines have announced plans for their own, dramatically more realistic iPhone apps.
I also found iBooks, Apple’s book reader and store, easy to use, and read a couple of books on it. I consider the larger color screen superior to the Kindle’s, and encountered no eye strain. But the iPad is much heavier than the Kindle and most people will need two hands to use it. The iBooks app also lacks any way to enter notes, and Apple’s catalog at launch will only be about 60,000 books versus more than 400,000 for Kindle.
I did run into some other annoying limitations. For instance, the email program lacks the ability to create local folders or rules for auto-sorting messages, and it doesn’t allow group addressing. The browser lacks tabs. And the Wi-Fi-only version lacks GPS. Also, videophiles may dislike the fact that the iPad’s screen lacks wide-screen dimensions, so you either get black bars above or below wide-screen videos, or, if you choose an option to fill the screen, some of the picture may get cut off.
All in all, however, the iPad is an advance in making more-sophisticated computing possible via a simple touch interface on a slender, light device. Only time will tell if it’s a real challenger to the laptop and netbook.
Find Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email mossberg@wsj.com.
Of all the things I need to fold, towels are the easiest. Probably because before long, they’ll be hanging on towel hooks, so there’s no pressure to fold them in any particularly attractive way. This robot is much more dignified, though, it must be said, very slow. That said, the sped-up video gives it an agreeable birdlike quality, does it not?
[via CNET]
AP - BlackBerry phone maker Research In Motion Ltd. on Wednesday reported sharply higher earnings for its fiscal fourth quarter but its stock dropped because its revenue fell short of Wall Street expectations.
Look up to see their beautiful craft emerging from the heavens. There should be no doubting that aliens helped create the wonders of the world now. Clearly they are masters at simple tools. [via Reddit]
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones
The iPhone is often blamed for AT&T’s much-maligned network in big cities like New York and San Francisco. As many have suggested in the past, AT&T has confirmed that it has worked with Apple to optimize data consumption on its network and lessen the bandwidth demands of Internet-happy iPhone users.
AT&T CTO John Donovan says the company sent a team of executives to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino to give the iPhone makers a “crash course in wireless networking” on several occasions. The meetings resulted in the iPhone being tweaked to lessen the strain on AT&T’s network and reduce the number of dropped calls and overall network congestion. The meetings continue and Apple’s employees are “in a Master’s class” on networking according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
AT&T’s network has improved its network in major cities, and it better if it hopes to keep profits pouring in thanks to its exclusivity on the iPhone. If longstanding rumors that Apple will release a CDMA iPhone prove true, a flood of users could migrate to Verizon, which has a much better reputation for network coverage and strength. You can bet those “There’s a Map for That” commercials will become more fierce once that happens.
Read [WSJ ] Via AppleInsider
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I tried a few ways of making that familiar playground taunt work syllable-wise, but it was not meant to be. Slightly more propitious is this agreement between the ambitious (but troubled) One Laptop Per Child initiative and Pixel Qi, maker of innovative hybrid displays. Pixel Qi’s sunlight-readable display technology (seen most recently in the Notion Ink Adam) was spun off more than two years ago, but they just couldn’t keep themselves apart. How romantic! I guess sometimes you just know you’re destined to be together.
The innovative, power-saving display will now be going into whatever the OLPC project comes up with next, be it a new version of the XO laptop or the rumored tablet.
[via Laptop]
How do you tell the difference between art and written language?
Oh, yeah. It's math.
[Rob Lee] and colleagues Philip Jonathan and Pauline Ziman analyzed the engravings, found on the few hundred known Pictish Stones. The researchers used a mathematical process known as Shannon entropy to study the order, direction, randomness and other characteristics of each engraving.
The resulting data was compared with that for numerous written languages, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese texts and written Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Ancient Irish, Old Irish and Old Welsh. While the Pictish Stone engravings did not match any of these, they displayed characteristics of writing based on a spoken language.
There is, sadly, not a lot of detail about what specific characteristics make language stand out from decoration. I'm guessing it has something to do finding patterns in the choice of symbols, or the way symbols are oriented, or how the patterns repeat. Wish there was more though. For the record, even if this is language, nobody is even close to deciphering what it means.
On a side note: Shannon entropy is a measure of the amount of information that we get from knowing one English letter. It's kind of the Entropy of Wheel of Fortune—how many guesses does it take to figure out all the letters of a sentence using only the information provided by the letters previously guessed. Besides identifying ancient scripts, it makes for a fun, time-wasting applet game.
Those you you who’ve been following the CrunchPad project since we first announced it in the summer of 2008 weren’t too happy to hear about the recent…hiccups…that we continue to fight through.
But never fear, while we continue to clean up the mess that our Asian contractor left behind we’ve been hard at work on a new project that lets anyone create an iPad like device from any laptop screen. It’s called the CrunchPad Kit and it goes on sale now. Best of all, we’re selling this for just $49 as an introductory price. Once 800 have sold, or about $44,000 in revenue, we’ll be moving to a higher price.
The CrunchPad team has been working around the clock here at our Palo Alto headquarters to get the kit ready for full production in time for the delivery of the iPad on April 3.
We know you want an iPad, but you aren’t as excited about that $499+ price tag. With the CrunchPad Kit, you can turn any laptop screen into a device that’s just as good, for a fraction of the price.
The kit contains everything you need to convert any laptop screen into a fully functional touch screen device. The key piece of technology is a transparent resizable modular touch screen overlap material that you add to the screen after removing it from the rest of the laptop. You then install the remaining electronics, as well as a power supply, and the device is ready to go. Also included in each kit is a 4G module that you can optionally activate and add to the device for always-on connectivity.
There’s real technology here, particularly in the touch module, that we’ve developed with our new partner. A number of patents have been filed around this new research, which we’re calling the F.U.J.J. With the F.U.J.J. you can convert any laptop screen of any size, up to 17 inches, into a CrunchPad.
There’s more information in the video above, including a complete walk through of the five minute installation process. Order your CrunchPad Kit now, we expect to be completely sold out within 48 hours.
Here’s one last picture of the Asian team we hired to help us build this product working on the F.U.J.J. from our office in Palo Alto after we sponsored their immigration visas to get them over here.
By Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Facing the specter of Apple’s (AAPL) iPad launch, Amazon.com (AMZN) has agreed to halt heavy discounting of e-book best-sellers in new pricing deals with two major publishers.
The e-book agreements, with CBS Corp.’s (CBS) Simon & Schuster and News Corp.’s (NWS) HarperCollins Publishers, mirror deals struck earlier this year with Apple for the iPad. Under what’s called the agency pricing model, some new best sellers will be priced at $9.99 but most will be priced at $12.99 to $14.99.
The new deals ensure that Amazon will have the same array of titles that rival Apple will offer on its digital bookstore. Apple has forged deals with five of the six major publishers to provide titles on the iPad, which is expected to pose competition for Amazon’s popular Kindle e-reader.
Amazon declined to comment.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Do you want TV everywhere? And wonder what might happen after the Comcast-NBC merger is complete? Or want to know how technologists and financiers see the digital-content market evolving? So do we. That’s why we invited insiders like Avner Ronen and Quincy Smith to speak at Disrupt, our media and technology conference taking place May 24-26, 2010, in New York.
Get your ticket now, because extra early-bird pricing expires at midnight. Before then, you can save $500.
Disrupt speakers are the gutsy people unafraid to offer an opinion and take disruptive steps in media and technology. We’re thrilled that Steve Case, Philip Kaplan and Fred Davis will also grace our stage. We’ll be announcing new speakers periodicially on the Disrupt blog, too.
We’re also running a competition for –you guessed it– disruptive startups. As those of you who follow TechCrunch events know, attending is a chance to see tomorrow’s big names. At Disrupt, successful and active investors like Ben Horowitz, as well as technology insiders like Om Malik, will judge and coach startups during a three-day process resembling March Madness blended with “The Apprentice.” We’re now poring over hundreds of applications. They contain fresh ideas in real-time search and sentiment; finding, sharing and enjoying digital content; disintermediating markets in ingenious ways; cool new hardware, and more. Hope to see you at Disrupt. (Want to do more than just buy a ticket? Go here to see our exhibitor packages.)
Avner Ronen, Founder, Boxee
Avner Ronen is the founder and CEO of Boxee, a freeware media player software platform. Prior to founding Boxee, Avner co-founded Odigo, an instant messaging service. Avner worked with the Odigo team from its founding in 1998 until its purchase by Comverse in 2002 for $20M. Avner stayed on with Comverse as the VP Corporate Strategy & Business Development until early 2007.
Quincy Smith, Founding Partner, CODE Advisors
Quincy Smith is a founding partner of CODE Advisors, an investment bank focused on media and technology. (Check out his recent video interview with TC.) He formerly served as Chief Executive Officer, CBS Interactive for CBS Corporation. In this role, he is responsible for overseeing the Company’s entire interactive strategy and helping to guide its implementation across CBS Corporation’s varied divisions and online businesses.
Steve Case, Founder, Revolution
Steve Case is the founder of Revolution, a company that seeks to drive transformative change by shifting power to consumers. Revolution’s mission is to partner with entrepreneurs in building businesses that give people more choice, control, and convenience in important areas of their lives. Prior to starting Revolution, Steve was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of America Online, Inc. (AOL) and, later, the chairman of AOL Time Warner. As the co-founder of AOL, Steve played an integral role in building the world’s largest Internet company and helped transform how people communicate, learn, and conduct business. AOL brought millions of Americans their first connection to the Internet.
Philip Kaplan, Founder, AdBrite
Philip (@pud) oversees AdBrite’s product management and innovation. Prior to founding AdBrite, Philip founded several businesses including PK Interactive, a software company that developed Web-based applications for Fortune 500 clients including Toyota and Mead Paper. Philip’s personal sites have earned accolades including Yahoo and Rolling Stone’s Site-of-the-Year, and #6 in TIME Magazine’s “Best of 2000.” Philip is a regular public speaker and is the bestselling author of F’d Companies (Simon & Schuster). He is on the board of the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. (Source: AdBrite)
Fred Davis, Founding Partner, CODE Advisors
Fred Davis previously founded the leading music law firm of Davis, Shapiro, Lewit, Montone & Hayes. He represented some of today’s most successful stars in rock, hip-hop and pop for the firm. He is also one of the leading experts in the burgeoning area of digital music, rights and distribution. Davis has been on the front lines of the Recording Industry’s tumultuous attempt to harness the power of the Internet by monetizing the explosion of interest in digital music downloads and subscription.
Ben Horowitz, Co-founder, Andreessen Horowitz
Ben Horowitz is a co-founder of the venture capital fund, Andreessen Horowitz. Horowitz was a co-founder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by HP in 2007, and Horowitz was appointed vice president and general manager of Business Technology Optimization for Software at HP. Earlier, he was vice president and general manager of America Online’s E-commerce Platform division, where he oversaw development of the company’s flagship Shop@AOL service Previously, Horowitz ran several product divisions at Netscape Communications.
Om Malik, Founder, GigaOm
Om Malik is the founder and senior writer for GigaOm. Before launching his own publishing venture, Om was a senior writer for Business 2.0 magazine covering telecom and broadband stories. He has also accepted the post of Venture Partner at True Ventures.
It’s nice that these hard drives should be announced right in the middle of a week of rugged camera reviews. You probably remember LaCie’s Rugged XL series of hard drives — but they’re more rugged and not at all waterproof. These A70s from Silicon-Power are waterproof, pressure-proof, and shockproof. Drop ‘em, take ‘em into the bath, or sit on ‘em all day — go ahead, they love it.
They come in 250, 320, 500, and 640GB varieties and are bus-powered, of course. They have USB 2.0 interfaces only, so don’t expect any crazy FireWire 800 or USB 3.0 speeds. The selling point here is that you can build a house out of them and then drive your car through it without breaking any. Well, it doesn’t say that, but I’d like to think I could.
If you’re wondering what to call that color, the press release has you covered:
The color is somewhere between dark red and tomato red, it is deemed to be the color of 2010 spring / autumn fashion! The mysterious red gives off a misty, varnish and passionate feel.
Excellent.
[via Slashgear]
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In 1916, a time when electricity was still something of a luxury toy, the Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company put out a pamphlet of House That Jack Built-themed doggerel illustrating all the wonderful ways you can use electricity around your home (and for such a low cost!).
There's a couple of things I find fascinating about this sales pitch.
First, you're looking at a world that still had a fairly limited number of uses for home electricity. Things were certainly on the upswing from a couple decades previous, when an electric hook-up was as much of a single-use tech toy as anything you can buy in Sky Mall. But this is an 18-page booklet, put out by a very biased source, which repeats several "benefits of electricity" as though it's running out of ideas. Hey, did we mention that you can use it to... um ...turn on a light?!
Second, the booklet really gives you a sense of the honest, fuck-all amazement and wonder people felt at being able to control their environment. In the new world of electricity, the toast never burns (at least, not like it used to when we were trying to grill it over an open fire), you need no longer schedule your week around laundry and everyone is healthier and happier. It's advertising hyperbole, sure. But only kinda. When you read old letters, you find that this was advertising capturing the way people really thought, rather than just pushing happiness that wasn't there. Think Dawn of the iPod, not Late-Night Wall-to-Wall Carpeting Commercial.
Finally, I love the last couple pages that allude to the real conflict between man and nature. Forget about simplifying housework. Centralized electricity changed energy production from a difficult, in-home process that kept the messy by-products of progress literally in your face, into something magical that happened when you threw a switch. The choking smoke was still there, but not at your house. There was still heavy labor involved, but it wasn't done by you or your children. For the first time, people were able to pretend that their standard of living was provided, free of downsides, by little elves that lived in the wall. All benefit, no detriment. Action without consequences. In other words, this is the point where everybody went a little bit bonkers.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In a 45-page opinion, Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that the government had violated a 1978 federal statute requiring court approval for domestic surveillance when it intercepted phone calls of Al Haramain, a now-defunct Islamic charity in Oregon, and of two lawyers who were representing it in 2004. Declaring that the plaintiffs had been "subjected to unlawful surveillance," the judge said that the government was liable to pay them damages. The ruling delivered a blow to the Bush administration's claims that its warrantless surveillance program, which Mr. Bush secretly authorized shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was lawful. Under the program, the National Security Agency monitored Americans' e-mail messages and phone calls without court approval, even though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, required warrants.Federal Judge Finds N.S.A. Wiretapping Program Illegal (NYT)
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[via PDNPulse, Daily Front Row, Pretty Foods]
“If you saw the road map, you’d be blown away.”
– Research In Motion Co-CEO Jim Balsillie says a better BlackBerry is on the way
We know iPhone OS 4 is in the pipes, and I imagine this little nugget of information is far from the only inklings we’ll have of new iPhone features over the next few months. Despite the extraordinary length of the Apple Insider article, there’s really only one piece of new information: the iPhone will be using an Expose-like interface to let you switch between apps, though due to scaling issues it is apparently only using the apps’ icons and not current screenshots. It’ll be triggered, they say, by quickly tapping the home button twice. Not terribly exciting, but it’s good to know.
Personally, I still find Palm’s card approach the most accessible multi-tasking around. If this Expose thing works, I’m sure it’ll be convenient, but will it have the amount of power a true task manager should have, or is it just going to be quicker than hitting home once and finding the app yourself?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 The Hindu | Amazon Strikes Two Book-Pricing Deals Wall Street Journal Facing the specter of Apple Inc.'s iPad launch, Amazon.com Inc. has agreed to halt heavy discounting of e-book best-sellers in new pricing deals with two major publishers. The e-book agreements, with CBS Corp. ... Reports: Publishers to set Amazon e-book prices Sony Says Publishers Will Start Setting E-Book Prices Tomorrow Amazon, publishers strike e-book pricing deal-WSJ |
Section: Computers, Mobile Computers
The iPad has the advantage of being linked to a big name brand like Apple, but don’t think that will stop competitors from trying to provide some competition in the tablet market. Computer manufacturer Asus has confirmed that it will offer not one, but two iPad rivals within a few months.
In an interview with Forbes, Asus Chairman Jonney Shih said that his company will release “at least two” tablets, likely to debut at the Computex trade show hosted in Taipei this June. One tablet would probably be Windows-based - Windows 7 Starter Edition or CE - and the other would be powered by Google’s software - Android or Chrome.
“There will be an Apple camp [in tablets], but Asus always tries to address the open camps of Google and Microsoft,” Shih said. He added “Content will play a very important role on tablets. The Google tablet will have a lot of media.”
Asus won’t have the brand recognition of Apple and are unlikely to put a dent in the iPad’s expected massive numbers. However, Asus has the potential to attract users who have been less than impressed by the iPad’s current limitations. Two tablets attracting users familiar with Windows and excited by Google’s software could help Asus piggyback on those two strong brands and earn strong sales.
Read [Forbes.com]
Full Story » | Written by Andrew Kameka for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 CNET | Take Advantage of New Simplified Cisco Wireless Routers PC World Cisco today unveiled two new wireless router lines aimed at simplifying the process of configuring a wireless network for home, or small and medium office environments. The new wireless routers attempt to provide PC users with a ... Cisco Unveils Easy Setup Consumer Routers Cisco Promises 'Simple Design' In New Consumer-Grade Routers New Cisco Routers Simplify Wireless Home Networks |
At a Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers event this morning to announce the doubling of its $100 million iFund, KPCB team member Bing Gordon read two poems–the first, a 2008 paean to Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, the second an ode to its forthcoming iPad. Below is the full text of both: “Welcome to the World, iPhone” and “Welcome to the World, iPad.”
Welcome to the World, iPhone
(Summer 2008)Welcome to the world, my new friend and pocket master.
Your 3-G-ness makes my world so much better and lots faster.
Your App Store is the killer app of mobile D-to-C,
Although you are surprised that 90 percent of apps are Free.100 Million is a frighteningly awesome number,
And threatens to eclipse Nintendo, put PSP in your penumbra.
Who’d have expected games like Rolando would have put you on the map,
Or that a virtual beer mug would become a killer app.Your baby brother iPod Touch is rustling, restless in the wings,
With tens of millions multi-touchers browsing iTunes for new things.
With so much excitement already, your future’s hardly hazy;
Christmas Season in the Apple Stores this year will be, like, crazy.Thanks, iPhone, for giving us a White to go with Black.
Thanks, iPhone, for making Leopard mobile, and connecting to my Mac.
iPhone, you’ve launched into the world, like a Cupertino rocket!
Steve envisioned computers on each desk; now it’s iPhone in every pocket!
Welcome to the World, iPad
(April 2010)Welcome to the world, iPad, we’ve been awaiting you for months.
You give my hands an article of lust they both can touch at once.
3 Billion downloads in two years from 150,000 titles in App Store,
We’ve seen previews under NDA that will drive many billions more.You’ve inspired new computer scientists on every college campus,
Who invented killer apps for toddlers, texting teens and check-in grampas.
Entrepreneurs without previous experience are creating jobs and wealth,
If they skip class to finish their new app, do they have to keep in stealth?Thanks, iPad, for giving us a Cinerama screen.
Thanks, iPad, putting soul into your new machine.
iPad, you are the next chapter in the Apple Computer lore,
But we have to take our tent and leave now, the line is forming at the store.
Headed straight for The Norton Anthology Of Poetry, I imagine …
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Research in Motion’s struggle to remain relevant in the market it helped create is going better than expected, though there’s certainly room for improvement. Reporting fourth-quarter earnings after market close Wednesday, the company said it added 4.9 billion new BlackBerry subscribers during the period, exceeding forecasts of 4.4 million to 4.7 million.
Welcome news given recent concerns about the impact new Apple (AAPL) iPhones headed to market might have on sales. Sadly for RIM (RIMM), the revenue and earnings per share posted today were both below expectations. The company earned $710.1 million, or $1.27 per share, on revenue of $4.08 billion. Analysts were expecting earnings of $1.28 per share on revenue of $4.3 billion, according to consensus estimates from Thomson Reuters.
At $69 RIM shares are down 6.7 percent in after-hours trading.
Social Media is catching fire, and college sports wants a piece of the action. Row27, a company we profiled a few months ago, has just released CrowdCameo. The product is a suite of picture-sharing web and mobile apps which let fans post pictures directly to a college sports-branded web page. Basically, all those drunk idiots (including myself) at college sports games can now spend all day taking crazy pictures of themselves in their LSU gear and see it on the college’s sports site.
Better yet, select photos can be shown up on the Big Board (the huge video screen) in college stadiums. Basically, fans take pictures of themselves or others via mobile phone or camera and send those pictures to a generic e-mail address (say fans@lsu.edu). Then, LSU screens those pictures and decides which ones go up on the fan site or on the board during half-time.
The service was piloted at, you guessed it, LSU, which is one of the bigger college sports schools in the country. Within a month or so, they’ve processed over 6,000 mobile photos. The service is now being made available more publicly and other college programs can get involved.
As you may have noticed by now, I’m a huge college football fan and also an avid believer in the ability for web technologies to be used to augment real-world experiences. I can see any college that implements a feature like CrowdCameo seeing a lot of engagement – who wouldn’t start taking pictures and uploading them to the net?
This is the second great product I’ve seen from Row27. They, like many other smart entrepreneurs, do a great job of funding their own work by obtaining a “beach head” client (in this case, LSU) to front the cost of development. Then, they make sure they own the IP so they can go ahead and sell the same product in the future to other companies (in this case, college sports teams).
Section: Apple, Communications, Cellphones, Gadgets / Other, Lifestyle
I like Starbucks a little more than I should, but really they have coffee and Wi-Fi, two things that seem to be necessary in my line of work. The good news here is that Starbucks has recently increased the pay-by-iPhone-app ability from 16 stores to over 1,000. It should be noted that those 1,000 include the locations that are inside of a Target. Of course, in the long haul 1,000 plus is still nothing as compared to the 74 billion locations that Starbucks has around the globe. But hey, 1,000 is better than 16 and it seems like a valid start. Sadly though, I do not have a Starbucks Target close to my house, and my local Starbucks is not included in that list. But just in case yours is, all you will need to do is load up the Starbucks Mobile Card app on your iPhone and then present the little QR Code that will display on your screen. And yes, you will have to at least show your iPhone so the barista can scan the code.
Via [MobileCrunch]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Google continues to stake out its territory online. The search-and-advertising giant announced Tuesday that it will bundle Adobe’s Flash player with downloads of the Chrome browser, putting Google in sharper opposition to Apple — and giving Adobe a powerful ally.
Google’s decision to throw its weight behind Flash is an attempt to protect its turf — the internet — and strengthen its Android and Chrome operating systems for mobile phones, tablets and notebooks. By contrast, Apple’s iPhone and upcoming iPad do not support Flash.
“Integrating Flash into Chrome is more of a signaling and partnership thing than anything else,” says Michael Coté, analyst at RedMonk, a research firm that focuses on strategy and developer-related issues. “After all, anyone who wants to get Flash can otherwise download it.”
A mere 5 percent of internet users run the Chrome browser today. But Google’s dominance as a search engine and advertising network gives it both money and clout. The company’s free, open source Android operating system is targeted at mobile phones and has already become popular with smartphone makers such as Motorola, HTC and Sony Ericsson. Separately, Google is planning to release Chrome OS, a new operating system for netbooks and tablets based on the Chrome browser.
In that context, Google’s embrace of Adobe Flash has far greater significance than the browser’s market share would indicate.
Once partners, now rivals, the competition between Apple and Google has intensified over the last few months. In January, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said Google’s “don’t be evil” mantra was “bullshit” and cast aspersions on Adobe Flash for being buggy. Earlier this month, Apple filed a lawsuit against smartphone maker HTC, a close partner of Google, alleging that HTC violated several patents related to the iPhone hardware and interface. Some industry watchers construe Apple’s lawsuit as an indirect attack on Google, whose Android OS powers HTC’s latest phone Nexus One.
But Jobs and Google CEO Eric Schmidt have recently been seen in public together, and the iPhone still utilizes Google services like Maps, indicating that the relationship between the two companies is not completely severed.
Flash will be the first plug-in that’s not from Google’s stable to be amalgamated into the browser, says a Google spokesperson. “This will make Flash on the browser a seamless experience,” says the spokesperson, “so you will see performance benefits and use of fewer resources. A lot of the controls and shortcuts will work better and Flash will truly feel like a part of the browser.”
In winning Google’s support for Flash, Adobe has found a powerful godfather for its technology. Apple decision to not include Flash for the iPhone and the iPad tablet has set the stage for the rise of HTML5, an open standard that Apple backs.
Already, video distribution platforms like Brightcove are trying to offer choices to publishers who want to reach Flash-less viewers. Brightcove, which provides online video backend systems for many websites including Wired.com, has introduced a product based on HTML5 so websites can continue to serve video, even if a visitor’s browser doesn’t support Flash.
For Adobe, working with browser companies may be one way of preserving Flash’s dominance.
“Our goal is to make the Flash API platform-neutral,” says Paul Betlem, senior director for Flash player engineering at Adobe. “We want to pull in the participation of all browser vendors and even other API vendors.”
Adobe says it is talking to Firefox and IE but it seems unlikely to find any backing from them.
“We don’t have any current plans to bundle Flash with Firefox downloads,” says Chris Blizzard, open source evangelist for Mozilla. “We’ve always made it easy to install Flash via our automatic plugin finder service, which has been part of Firefox for years.”
Betlem says that may not be enough for developers. Integrating Flash into the browser makes both the browser and Flash more powerful, he says. “Some of the problems developers are identifying with the current plug-in system is that all the key events that browser has access to is shared with the plug-in,” he says. “This allows web developers and users a more powerful and consistent experience.”
Ultimately, the Apple-Google rivalry comes down to the future of the web and Google’s place in it, says Coté. Through the iPhone and iPad, Apple is increasingly creating a “walled garden” where content and games need to be approved by Apple and accessed through its app store. Meanwhile, it is trying to control how the internet develops by deciding which technologies it will support on its devices — yes to HTML5, no to Flash.
For Google, that’s a future that can directly threaten its revenue stream, since Google’s business model is built on the openness and anarchy of the public internet.
“Strategically, it is not in Google’s interest to supplant an existing platform with a new one,” says Coté. “The way Google makes its revenues is with the web completely open. If Apple starts controlling access to content then it would make it very difficult for Google to find ways to insert itself into the system.”
Google and Adobe say that decision to integrate Flash with Chrome is for now limited to the browser for PCs. But the duo are working together to offer the latest version of the Flash player on Android mobile phones.
At the Mobile World Congress, Adobe demonstrated the latest version of Flash on Android devices. It hasn’t said exactly when it will be offered to users, but Betlem says “Google is very supportive” of the technology.
“I don’t believe the plans are finalized on the exact distribution of Flash players on Android-based devices,” says Betlem. “But my expectation is that there will be a seamless experience for installing Flash players on smartphones, though it will ultimately be a device manufacturer’s choice rather than Google’s.”
It would help Google strengthen its position a pro-choice company and position itself as an alternative to Apple. After all, in the smartphone business, the lines are becoming increasingly clear. It’s the iPhone vs. other platforms.
“When it comes to Android, the idea is that you will have the complete web instead of the blue-box web that Apple is offering,” he says. “So, obviously Google is interested in having Flash around and increasing the access to it.”
Google’s Flash support also doesn’t mean that it will not back HTML5. “Google has never claimed to be an open source company,” he says. “What they have claimed to offer is choices and alternatives.”
Support for Flash in the Chrome browser will also help Google’s plans to put its operating system on tablets. Last month, mock-ups from Google showed the company is planning to partner with gadget manufacturers to introduce tablets that could potentially challenge the iPad.
See Also:
Photo: (BlubrNL/Flickr)
Short Version:
It can be said that Motorola just got its groove back. The Droid is probably one of the best phones out there, followed by the Devour, and they’re constantly releasing a few good models every few weeks, which is better than some manufacturers can say. They’ve hit on a strong formula: build a nice phone, put Android on it, sell a few hundred thousand. Repeat. While the CLIQ XT isn’t Motorola’s best phone, it follows Moto’s not-so-secret recipe without shaming the chef.
Features:
Pros:
Cons:
The CLIQ XT is a candybar touchscreen phone with a 3.1 HGVA 320×480 pixel display. It weighs as much as the iPhone (130 grams) and is almost exactly the same size as Apple’s ubiquito-phone. It supports US and international GSM networks and costs $129 with two-year contract.
The device comes with a 2GB micro SD card and lasts about 24 hours on one charge with cautious use. Standby is 19 days, but I saw battery failure at about three days.
No so bad
In all, this phone is not so bad. It’s much better than the previous CLIQ, a top heavy abomination with a keyboard, and MOTOBLUR runs quite handily on this model, unlike the previous version. Because I’ve been reviewing so many MOTOBLUR-capable handsets I love that the device stores my email and social networking preferences in the cloud. If you rarely upgrade, you probably won’t notice this but it’s a nice feeling, akin to slipping into a warm bath of unhardened yet cooling Jell-o.
On the whole, the device performs as you’d expect it to. The networking is fast, the mapping works well, and SWYPE – a keyboard style that allows you to “swipe” letters to type longer words – works perfectly for data entry. There are four buttons on the bottom and a touch sensitive directional pad. Volume buttons are on the left side and the camera and power buttons are on the right.
I used the phone for a bit and was pleased that all of the default widgets, especially the social networking stuff, handled themselves even against the onslaught of my online social life. There was no lag in the windows and all of the Android apps worked fine.
It also comes with an purple back plate, for the fashion-conscious, which points to a teen/young adult focus.
Not so good
To be absolutely honest, I can’t find anything wrong with this phone. It’s a little mundane and a little clunky but it works. If anything has taken up the Sidekick mantle in the non-expert smartphone arena it’s been Android and this is a perfect example of what happens when you pair Android, a nice overlay, and non-adventurous hardware design. Friends, this is one of the first Android feature-phones.
Bottom line
Is this worth the price of admission? Sure. If you’re looking for a nice, standard Android phone, you could do worse. It’s a strong, if slightly unexciting, phone that would look great in a teenager’s purse.
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Email / IM, Smartphones, VoIP, Mobile
Verizon has let go of the Android 2.1 release to selected users as part of a larger roll-out plan that will continue for the next several days. Released in batches the update is an OTA (over the air), according to Engadget a total of 10,000 users received the update yesterday and no one will be receiving new updates today. The roll out will continue on 4/1 with 200,000 devices slated for update each day until finished.
We’ve heard mixed stories on the delay. Some say it was Skype compatibility that was holding it up, while others contend it was something else. Verizon made a go of the update last week and then pulled the plug at just 1,000 users. It is still unclear to us if the limited release was to plan or an issue was encountered.
The delayed release looks to be worth waiting for: support for Yahoo Mail, multitouch in Browser, Maps and Gallery (the places you’d actually use it), Speech to text for text boxes, and a new 3D gallery.
Read [Verizon update PDF] via [JK ontherun]
Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
AT&T has taken a lot of heat from iPhone customers complaining about network performance, but the carrier insinuated in an article today that Apple was partly at fault as well.
AT&T executives visited Apple last year to provide Apple engineers a “crash course” in wireless networking to reduce the load that iPhones were putting out on the network, said John Donovan, AT&T’s chief technology officer, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. As a result, Apple tweaked its iPhones to communicate with AT&T’s towers and mitigate network overload, according to Donovan.
“They’re well past networking 101, 201 or 301,” said Donovan, adding that Apple is now “in a Master’s class.”
That would imply that AT&T felt Apple engineers weren’t well versed in wireless networking, and the iPhone — not just AT&T’s network — was causing issues such as dropped calls, patchy coverage and sluggish downloads. A 2008 study by Wired.com found that iPhone download speeds were especially slow on AT&T’s network compared with international carriers, which suggested that AT&T was overloaded. However, a recent study by PC World saw significant improvement in AT&T’s network speeds — so perhaps AT&T’s crash course did indeed help address the problem.
However, iPhones keep selling, and network shortcomings are a prevalent problem. Donovan admitted that addressing these issues has increased his blood pressure 20 points.
See Also:
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Section: Computers, Netbooks, Software / Applications, Wireless
They say timing is everything. For Joojoo, the tablet computer, the timing couldn’t be worse. Six months earlier and this post would have been completely different. With launching the same month as Apple’s iPad, court documents show the device managed to sell a disappointing 90 units.
To make matters worse, the company behind Joojoo is entrenched in a legal battle with Techcrunch. The 75 buyers who’ve not been given a refund have held on through Apple’s announcement and subsequent hype. While the tablet looks to be a compelling offering a the same price as the iPad, the company’s future remains uncertain.
By contrast, Apple’s pre-order was successful enough to move the shipping date for more pre-orders back, clearly hitting some internal target. As more and more companies announce a tablet, iPad demand seems unfazed. Will other tablets fade into the background buzz or will the iPad open the floodgates.
Read: [Gizmodo]
Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
It’s here. It’s finally, finally here. After countless rumor-fueled false starts and delays, the Android 2.1 update has finally started rolling out to Verizon Droid owners.
Unfortunately, it’s only been rolled out to around 8,000 Droids at this point — and considering that there are purportedly at least a million of these things floating around, that means the majority of people are still waiting for their update. Are you one of them? Fear not, friend! We’ve got all the details on how to manually update your Droid to the official, Verizon-and-Google-blessed build of Android 2.1.
All in all, it should take you about 10 minutes. There is no “hacking” required – your device doesn’t need to be rooted, overclocked, underpantsed, or what have you. This is the same package you’d be downloading from Verizon (it even comes from Google’s server!), just a whole lot sooner.
Here’s how to do it:
Bam! Download, rename, reboot, hold a button, done. Could it get much simpler? As soon as the upgrade process finishes, you’ll be Android 2.1′d up and ready to go.
Enjoy!
[Much love to the guys at AllDroid for digging up the update file name, and to Nikolai for giving us the heads up]
Hey, Sprint. Whatever changed recently, whoever you hired to save you from the downward spiral you’re in: keep doing it, and give that person a raise. You’ve got the EVO 4G, the first Sprint device (Sorry Palm!) I’ve heard actual, non-geeky people talking about with excitement in as long as I can remember. And now, you’ve just morphed your 30-day refund policy into the industry’s finest.
The new “Sprint Free Guarantee” policy can be explained quite simply: You get your money back. You get it back for the device costs, the taxes, and the activation fees. You get the money you’ve spent on your plan back. ETF? Waived. If you give money to Sprint in the first 30-days and then change your mind, they give that money back.
It’s a dangerous move, considering how many shady people might try to find a way to take advantage of this – but at the same time, Sprint desperately needs to convince people to test the waters, and an unconditional money back guarantee is probably a damned good way to do it.
Sprint Free Guarantee goes live for all customers signing up from tomorrow on, at which point we’ll start tearing apart the fine print to make sure it’s all as good as it sounds. We’re guessing there’s a line or two about “reasonable limitations” on overage fees and long-distance calling, so don’t try calling Europe for 29 days straight in hopes of putting it on Sprint’s tab.
Section: Communications, Broadband Cards, Mobile, Computers, Laptops, Wireless
Look what we have here, it seems as if Sony is planning to roll out an updated Vaio P. A recent FCC listing is showing off a Vaio with model number PCG-11111L and it is noted as coming with support for CDMA850 and CDMA1900. In short, a mobile broadband capable Sony Vaio. Other little tidbits that were revealed in this listing include the Vaio having Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR. Finally, and this is just making an assumption based on the confidentiality request date, it looks like this updated Vaio P could be available with Sprint or Verizon as of May 13.
Read [Engadget]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Sometime yesterday afternoon, some new information started floating around the Kingdom of Ol’ Rumorton. “The Samsung Galaxy S… another version is coming,” whispered the trees of Rumorton, “and it’s called the Galaxy S Pro! And it has a physical keyboard!”
The rumors were in a bit too shaky of a state yesterday for us to cover them; we didn’t know much about the site that claimed it, they admitted that it was hearsay, and (outside of the fan-made render above) there weren’t any pictures. Plus, who the hell listens to trees? We decided to skip it.
Well, the rumor just got a whole lot more credible.
Mobile maven Eldar Murtazin just tweeted out details of the project, claiming that it’s the exact same model save for the QWERTY keyboard, will cost about 50 euros (~70 dollars) more, and launch sometime in June. Given that Eldar’s got a rumor accuracy rate rivaling the hit rate of a brick wall in a squash court, we’re believers now.
So lets think about this: The Galaxy S is an absolute beast. It has a gorgeous, absurdly bright Super AMOLED screen, and a 1GHz processor that Samsung claims blows everyone else (read: Snapdragon) away. It’s Android-powered. And now we’re talking about adding a physical keyboard to it? Hello, dream phone.
[Render via hdblog.it]
 The Hindu | AT&T Prepares Network For Battle Wall Street Journal With a new version of the iPhone in the works, the clock is ticking for AT&T Inc. to get its much-criticized network ready for the looming battle. The carrier has taken a beating from consumers who have complained about poor coverage in ... Will Verizon iPhone Make AT&T Look Even Worse? Benefits of a Verizon iPhone for AT&T Customers Apple iPhone Ditching AT&T Exclusivity: A Sign of Desperation |
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile
New information is suggesting that Rogers will soon be offering the BlackBerry Bold 9700—in white. Shocking, I know. After all, we saw the same thing with the release of the BlackBerry Bold 9000. Rogers had the Bold 9000 available in black and then they released it in white.
Basically, at this point the information is coming by way of a tipster and has not been officially confirmed. Hence the reason for listing this post as a rumor. That said, it seems more than likely to be true.
As far as pricing, that looks like it will be the same $149.99 that you would currently pay for the black Bold 9700. Of course, in the past Rogers lowered the pricing on the black Bold 9000 to $99.99 on contract when they unveiled the white Bold 9000. So maybe we can see that happen again.
As of yet, nothing in terms of a guess as to when Rogers will make this official.
**Note, white BlackBerry Bold image off to the right hand side is actually that of a white BlackBerry Bold 9000, and not the 9700, which just goes to show I have little skill in Photoshop.
Read [MobileSyrup]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Monetization on mobile is a huge business and ScoreLoop wants a piece of the action. ScoreLoop, a white label social platform that helps developer implement social features into their iPhone and Android apps, is entering the monetization game by providing its developers with the ability to monetize their applications.
ScoreLoop will provide two primary monetization options for developers. First, they will enable virtual goods purchasing – similar to TapJoy’s virtual goods platform or Plus+ from ngmoco. Second, ScoreLoop will provide developers with a way of charging for downloadable content. For example, you could download a new theme or a new character by paying an extra $0.99.
CEO Marc Gumpinger admitted that their monetization features are not particularly new, but the value that ScoreLoop provides is white labeling. In fact, in the crowded sea of platform solutions for iPhone (more on that in a future post), ScoreLoop’s main differentiator is that it enables a fully white-labeled platform for developers. Big players such as MySpace, Astro Ranch publisher Tag Games, and Parachute Panic publisher FDG Entertainment are among ScoreLoop’s customers.
It’s interesting to see the various “platform” companies in the mobile space and their diverse moves into helping developers monetize. Due to the nature of the App Store, there is a huge need for developers to find the right method to monetize their free applications, and there’s a clear push in the industry of moving towards a freemium model on mobile. Analytics companies such as Flurry and Mobclix provide their analytics for free to gain a relationship with developers and have since turned that relationship into a monetization channel.
Others such as ngmoco’s Plus+, OpenFeint and now ScoreLoop, have created social networking platforms for the iPhone and are augmenting those by helping developers make money. I’m watching this sector closely and very interested to see how this dance shakes out.
ScoreLoop is based and founded in Munich, Germany, with offices in San Francisco and Beijing. They’ve raised $2.8 million from two of the biggest VC firms in Europe, Earlybird Venture Capital and Target Partners.
Did you know that more expensive gadget break less often? If you answered “Duh, of course,” then congratulations: You have a brain and can likely think and keep you mouth open at the same time. Nevertheless, a new study showing the reliability figures in the digital camera market has some interesting (and non-obvious) results.
First, the study was conducted over three years by SquareTrade, a company which sells warranties. While this could add a bias, it also means the company has plenty of its own accurate data to draw on. With that in mind, read on.
The study looked at failure rates of cameras based on both price and age. Around 7% of cameras will fail in the first two years (another 5% break due to accidents), rising to nearly 10% after three years. That doesn’t sound too bad, unless you’re in that unlucky minority.
If you spend a little more money, your camera is likely to last longer, because it is better built, although quality varies widely with brand (see below). So while the overall (2-year) malfunction rate of cameras is 11%, fully 7.4% of failures come from cameras under $150. Spend over $500 and the chance the camera will stop working falls to just 4%.
This is hardly panic material, though, and those extended warranties are probably still a lot more trouble than they’re worth (if they didn’t make money, nobody would sell them).
But one final tidbit of information is the breaking down of reliability by brand. This counts only for compacts: despite a sample-size of 60,000 cameras, SquareTrade hasn’t sold enough warranties to DSLR owners to get meaningful results. For cameras under $300, Panasonic wins, with a malfunction rate of 5.3% compared the Casio, coming in last at 13%. Between $300 and $500, Panasonic wins again, with just 1.9%. The big surprise? Canon loses, with 6.2% of its premium compacts failing in the first two years, making them three times more likely to break than those from Panasonic.
Should you base your buying decisions on these figures? Probably not. After all, with the exception of cheap Casio cams (and Polaroids, but who buys those anyway?) these figures are all pretty low. The upside? Tech actually seems pretty reliable these days.
Camera Reliability Study (PDF) [SquareTrade. Thanks, Dan!]
When Cisco bought Flip video, the maker of the super-simple USB camcorder, we were intrigued. What on Earth could a commercial router company want with a consumer camera company? Today Cisco has announced the first product of the partnership. It’s a wireless router, and there is no camera.
The router, or rather range of routers, comes under the name Valet and confusingly there are also identical versions from Linksys, another Cisco company, which lack the mysterious Valet spec.
Valet routers come with a USB stick which, when inserted into your computer will automatically configure the network settings for you. This is great news, especially for non-techy users, and it works on both OS X and Windows. According to Cisco, it takes around “20 to 30 complicated steps to set up a single computer”, and Valet cuts it down to just three.
This seems a little exaggerated. Assuming that your router comes pre-configured from your ISP, as is usually the case in Europe, you have – on a Mac – just two steps: click the network name in the drop-down Airport menu and then copy in the password from the back of the router. Even Windows, which requires a little more work, doesn’t run to anything like 20 steps.
The Valet routers cost a rather steep $100 to $150, and you can pick up a Wi-Fi USB dongle to connect older machines to the network for an outlandish $80. All of the range works on 802.11n, and all come with software that will let you control access for various devices, allowing you to stop the kids surfing porn on their iPod Touches, for example.
And the Flip connection? A mystery. The press release mailed to me uses the “F” word seven times, but even the explanation explains nothing:
With complementary backgrounds and expertise, our Cisco and Flip teams have combined forces to change the rules for home wireless with a product line that empowers consumers to easily set up, enjoy and manage all of their wireless devices anywhere in their homes.
Perhaps it’s the easy-plug and go USB tech? Or maybe something to do with both “Flip” and “Valet” having an “l” in their names? Or nothing at all, other than a simple trick to get tech bloggers to write about an otherwise ho-hum router? If so then well played, Cisco. You got me.
Valet Family [Cisco. Thanks, Jamie!]
The rather unappetizingly-named “Land Peel” is a concept floor-covering from Kyoto-based student Shin Yamashita. Like a hi-tech tatami, the mats cover your floor in a comfortable, insulating material. Unlike a traditional tatami, they can be folded to make tables, desks and back rests.
The desk/seat-back combo looks particularly useful, and much better for the posture than my current lean-against-wall-with-MacBook-on-lap setup. It does look a little toy-like thanks to the brightly-colored stripes and spots, like a pack of 1980s hair-gel, but fix that and I’m in. Even better would be to incorporate the folding, self-supporting structures into actual tatami-mats for truly invisible, pop-up furniture.
Shin Yamashita: Land Peel [Design Boom]
You may remember the Umbuster, a weaponized brolly we described as a “Crazy Fighting Umbrella with Knuckle-Duster Handle“. Some of the folks behind the Umbuster, at the Australian design company ENESS, have also created these geeky ceramic tiles, named 5¼-inch.
Clearly they are molded from smaller 3½-inch floppies, but as they are not for sale anyway, it doesn’t really matter. And as unglazed tiles, they would be better suited to duty as trivets than as a kitchen splash-back. But there’s no denying it: you want some. I’d love to have my kitchen kitted out in properly-glazed floppy-tiles. If I kept things plain white, I might even slip the change past the Lady.
If you have a pottery workshop near you, these would actually be dead easy to make yourself by just pouring “slip” (a soupy mixture of clay and water) into a mold an waiting for it to dry. The hardest part would be finding an actual floppy disk to take the mold from.
5¼-Inch [ENESS/Electronic Miracles via Make]
Game Table will surely join a legion of games on Apple’s iPad, but it is worth a mention here as it stands out in one rather unusual way: it doesn’t actually do anything.
Game Table is just like a real world game table, and comes with boards and pieces for checkers and chess, along with a deck of cards. After that, its up to you. The game provides nothing but a physics engine to let you move the pieces, and to shuffle, deal and flip cards. It’s up to you what game you play, and whether you follow the rules or break them. It is also, like the real-world versions of these games, a two-player experience. If you want to play alone, you’d better enjoy solitaire: There are no computer-controlled opponents here.
I think this is brilliant. You can never lose pieces, a strong wind cannot scatter chessmen when you play in the park, and as long as you have your iPad with you, you also have your chess set. I guess you could even pull off some simple card-tricks.
The future will bring Go and Backgammon to the game, and Game Table will cost just $1 when launched on (hopefully) Saturday 3rd April. I imagine I shall be buying this as soon as I get an iPad.
Game Table [Game Table App]
Apple has updated iTunes to version 9.1 to offer support for the iPad release on Saturday. The headline features are iPad syncing and support for books, and there is also some tweaking to the Genius playlist options.
The iPad syncing obviously won’t do anything until you plug in an iPad this weekend, but you can test out the books support right now. Take any EPUB-format book you may have on your computer and drop it into iTunes. It is automatically added to the new Books section, which replaces (and includes) the Audiobooks section. If the book already has metadata and cover art, these are preserved. You can also sort by category, title and author.
Only EPUB will work, and I converted mine using the cross-platform freeware application Calibre, itself a kind of iTunes for e-books. Dragging a MOBI file does nothing. PDF files can still be added, but they end up in the main library as before, not the Books library.
Once the books are in iTunes, what can you do? Right now, nothing. They don’t show up in the list of syncable content for an iPod Touch, nor can you view them in iTunes itself, despite the option to “play” in the pop-up, right-click menu. We hope that the iPhone gets its own version of the iBooks app, if only so you can read from multiple devices, Kindle-style. We doubt the Mac will get iBooks, though. That’s what the iPad is for.
There’s one other takeaway from this early release of iTunes. Normally Apple updates iTunes on the day a new product ships, and this usually makes downloads painfully slow, and often means you can’t use your new device right away. Either Apple has learned its lesson, or it is expecting to sell rather a lot of iPads on Saturday.
iTunes [Apple]
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Oh, 
Everyone agrees that 
The San Francisco Chronicle has revamped the comics section in 96 Hours, its weekend supplement (published on Thursdays!?). The new comics page features all indy comics, instead of the usual dreary syndicate stuff. A maze is threaded through the comic. The new section features Jon Adams, Keith Knight, Sacha Eckes and Michael Capozzola.
