|
|
|
|
Astronauts remove ammonia tank on space station - CNN International
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 11 Apr 2010 | 3:32 am AT&T’s signal-boosting 3G MicroCell hitting the shelves in San Francisco todayIf AT&T gets a bad wrap for having poor signal quality in any city, it’s San Francisco. Part of this is due to the sudden influx of iPhones in the Silicon Valley that began in 2007, putting an almighty strain on the network; of the roughly 800,000 or so people living in San Francisco, we’re estimating that around 10 million of them (or 1,150%) are carrying iPhones. Throw in ridiculous topography and monstrous buildings, and it starts to get tough to properly blanket the entire area in radio waves. Thus, it should come as no surprise that San Francisco is one of the first cities to be getting AT&T’s cell-tower-in-a-box, the 3G MicroCell. AT&T just hit us up to let us know that we should start seeing the little router-sized, broadband-powered signal boosters on the shelves in their San Francisco stores beginning today.
If you’re in a dead zone or if the ridiculously sized buildings around your home are cause your calls to fail on the regular, you might want to consider picking one of these up. It’ll set you back $150 bucks up front, but there’s no monthly fee — that is, unless you want unlimited minutes whenever you’re connected to your MicroCell. That’ll set you back $20 bucks a month. We just got our hands on one of these things this evening, and we’ll be heading up to the city later this week to give it a spin. Check back for a hands on report some time this week.
Source: MobileCrunch | 11 Apr 2010 | 3:12 am Larry Sanger Tells FBI Wikipedia Distributes "Child Pornography"Taco Cowboy writes with news that Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, has reported to the FBI what he says is child pornography on Wikipedia, including links (redacted in the letter just linked) to entries about pedophilia and the genre of manga known as lolicon. The Register has up an article with some analysis, which mentions the opinion of at least one attorney whose "reading of the statute [requiring reporting of child porn images] is that it does apply to the Wikimedia Foundation."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 11 Apr 2010 | 2:58 am Australia.Text messages notify residents to collect their mail"You've got mail" will take on a whole new meaning in Australia when a new government plans take effect. The Herald Sun reports. ... Residents would be notified by text message that they had new mail...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Apr 2010 | 2:36 am Wired: With Tweetie Acquisition, Twitter Locks On MobileWired on Twitter's acquisition of Tweetie: ... While its possible to use Twitter purely in an SMS context sending texts from your phone that go into your timeline, or as direct messages to others and...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Apr 2010 | 2:24 am Staycation Specials: Zip line for free in San Francisco - San Jose Mercury News
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 11 Apr 2010 | 1:02 am Germany holds Europe's first '4G' auction (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 11 Apr 2010 | 12:51 am VisLab Sponsors Milan-to-Shanghai Driverless Trekincuso writes "VisLab announced the the most advanced challenge so far ever organized for autonomous vehicles. Two driverless electric cars will perform a trip from Italy to China to demonstrate the feasibility of autonomous driving in real traffic conditions. Each vehicle will be equipped with five laser scanners, seven cameras, GPS, inertial measurement unit, three Linux PCs, and x-by-wire driving system. The mission will start on July 10 in Milan, Italy and will reach Shanghai, China on October 10 (10/10/10) on a 13,000 km route though Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, and finally China."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 10 Apr 2010 | 11:51 pm Astronauts take 2nd spacewalk to replace tankAstronauts are back outside the International Space Station, making their second spacewalk in three days to replace an old storage tank. Rick Mastracchio and Clayton Anderson floated outSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Apr 2010 | 11:38 pm Early Morning on the WillametteSource: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Apr 2010 | 11:13 pm Pencil Innards and Other Novel Solar TechViable materials for making solar power work can easily sound like Avatar's unobtanium. With cheaper alternatives to silicon on par with platinum for rarity, research into winning solar tech materials is heating up. What if we could use a more ...Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Apr 2010 | 10:53 pm Broadband funds stimulate laments from companies (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Apr 2010 | 10:48 pm Remember Google’s Super Bowl Search Ad? Now You Can Make Your Own
Some time in the last few days Google launched a new feature called the “Search Stories Video Creator“. And damn if it isn’t fun. The new feature prompts you to input up to seven search queries spread across Google’s search features (including Images, Maps, and standard web search), choose a song, and it generates a video in the same style as Google’s other Search Stories. The whole process only takes a few minutes (the tool automatically uploads your video to YouTube when you’re ready). And while there are plenty of parodies already out there, we can expect a whole lot more of them to pop up in the next few days. For those who were wondering, Parisian Love was only one of Google’s Search Stories — the company actually began releasing a series of them last fall (you can see all of them here). Here’s a test video I threw together:
     
Source: TechCrunch | 10 Apr 2010 | 10:00 pm Video Chat Coming To The Next iPhone? All Signs Are Pointing To Yes - Washington Post
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 10 Apr 2010 | 8:46 pm "Father of Java" Resigns From Sun/OracleThrashing Rage writes "James Gosling has confirmed he is leaving Sun/Oracle:'Yes, indeed, the rumors are true: I resigned from Oracle a week ago (April 2nd). I apologize to everyone in St Petersburg who came to TechDays on Thursday expecting to hear from me. I really hated not being there. As to why I left, it's difficult to answer: just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good. The hardest part is no longer being with all the great people I've had the privilege to work with over the years. I don't know what I'm going to do next, other than take some time off before I start job hunting.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 10 Apr 2010 | 8:45 pm Video Chat Coming To The Next iPhone? All Signs Are Pointing To Yes
As they do with any major new iPhone OS release, people have been tearing apart the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK from the very second it was available. Almost immediately, someone noticed that bits and pieces of iChat had found their way into the new software. By itself, it didn’t really make sense. The iPhone has plenty of incredibly solid third-party IM applications — some of them being amongst the App Store’s best sellers. Why would Apple be sneaking any parts of iChat onto the iPhone? Then the first mentions of a front facing camera were unearthed, and it all started coming together in the form of two little words: video chat. Alas, there was no concrete proof that Apple was following the same train of thought.. until now. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>      
Source: TechCrunch | 10 Apr 2010 | 8:12 pm Video Chat Coming To The Next iPhone? All Signs Are Pointing To Yes
As they do with any major new iPhone OS release, people have been tearing apart the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK from the very second it was available. Almost immediately, someone noticed that bits and pieces of iChat had found their way into the new software. By itself, it didn’t really make sense. The iPhone has plenty of incredibly solid third-party IM applications — some of them being amongst the App Store’s best sellers. Why would Apple be sneaking any parts of iChat onto the iPhone? Then the first mentions of a front facing camera were unearthed, and it all started coming together in the form of two little words: video chat. Alas, there was no concrete proof that Apple was following the same train of thought.. until now.
You see, much of iPhone OS’ underpinnings can be revealed through tricks called “class dumping” and “string dumping”. Through class dumping, you can take a peek into which frameworks and APIs are being used by any given application. (Ever heard of an application using “unpublished” APIs? This is how the developers found those APIs in the first place — and how Apple caught them, for that matter.) Through string dumping, all of the various bits of text pre-programmed into an app can be ripped out and displayed. When the guys over at 9to5Mac started using the above techniques to explore the innards of the new SDK, it all came spilling out. There they were, in good ol’ plain English: references to video chatting, ranging from inviting users to terminating calls. More digging unveiled that Apple appears to be testing video chat on four servers: three privately located on Apple’s own intranet, and one which is (currently) open to the world (albeit mostly useless).
We spoke to our own sources, many of whom were tight-lipped on the matter. Of those who did pipe up, they were able to confirm 9to5’s findings, along with at least 30 other references to video chat support that went unmentioned. All of them — and us, for that matter — seem to be wondering the same thing: why the heck did Apple leave this in (semi-private) public view? Apple’s known for shrouding even the most minute details in secrecy; here, it’s seems as if they’re almost intentionally throwing many dozens of hints about an unannounced feature in a place where tinkerers were almost guaranteed to find it. Is Apple learning to love the rumor mill? My current educated guess based on everything that has been whispered to me so far: I don’t think iChat, as an IM client that would compete with the third party apps, is coming to the iPhone — but that Apple will be using bits and pieces of the iChat core to power their video chat service. I’ll keep my ear to the ground for more.
Source: MobileCrunch | 10 Apr 2010 | 7:48 pm Developers In Denial: The Seesmic Case Study
That sure sounds ominous. And then, BOOM. Twitter released its own Blackberry app and acquired Tweetie, which has a popular iPhone and desktop app. The threats are over, Twitter fired missiles at its developers. Anyone who didn’t see this coming was in denial. Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur is one developer who sure didn’t see it coming (disclosure: I’m an investor in Seesmic): Seesmic founder Loic LeMeur two weeks ago, answering questions on Formspring:
Loic Le Meur yesterday:
Oops.      
Source: TechCrunch | 10 Apr 2010 | 6:59 pm Scientists Turn T-Shirts Into Body Armorseparsons writes "Scientists at the University of South Carolina recently transformed ordinary tee-shirts into bullet-proof armor. By splicing cotton with boron, the third hardest material on the planet, scientists created a shirt that was super elastic but also strong enough to deflect bullets. Xiaodong Li, lead researcher on the project, says the same tech may eventually be used to create lightweight, fuel-efficient cars and aircrafts."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 10 Apr 2010 | 6:59 pm Woowoo density goes to infinityFifth dimensional, quantum, Zarathustran, vibrational, third-eye, DNA activation and healing. It's apparently "calming." Zarathustran!Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Apr 2010 | 6:56 pm Woowoo density goes to infinity Fifth dimensional, quantum, Zarathustran, vibrational, third-eye, DNA activation and healing. It's apparently "calming."
Zarathustran!
ReboxingSo I reboxed the iPad so I can return it to Apple. As I say in the video, it’s not out of dogmatism but because I simply don’t see a good use for the machine and don’t want to spend $500...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Apr 2010 | 6:54 pm Steve Jobs Responds To iPhone SDK Complaints: ‘Intermediate Layers Produce Sub-Standard Apps’
Greg Slepak, CEO of TaoEffect, emailed Jobs to voice his concerns and got a pair of brief responses, which he has posted to his site. In his first message to Jobs, Slepak included a link to a highly negative thread on Hacker News where many developers criticized the move. Jobs responded:
In the post that Jobs refers to, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber explains the logic that was behind Apple’s move (and given Jobs’ endorsement of the article, it looks like he was spot on). The gist of the article is that Apple doesn’t want a ‘meta-platform’ to exist between the iPhone and developers, as this would facilitate simultaneous development for competitors’ platforms and give Apple less control over the iPhone ecosystem. But while Gruber’s article is well thought out and very logical, I don’t think it does much to address why developers are furious. The issue isn’t that developers don’t understand why Apple is doing this — it’s that the actions Apple is taking to protect its own interests are violating something fundamental: they’re keeping developers from using the tools they want to work with. Gruber’s article didn’t convince Slepak, either. His response to Jobs, in part:
Jobs replied once more, this time within a few minutes, to say:
I doubt this argument will do much to placate developers. There are plenty of examples of applications built using intermediary tools that are high quality. And the App Store is rife with applications built using Apple’s own tools that are absolutely terrible. Apple is already enforcing a screening process anyway — why isn’t it checking for quality there, rather than telling developers how they’re going to build their apps? Here’s the last message Slepak sent to Jobs:
For the whole Email exchange (with Slepak’s full responses to Jobs) check out his post.      
Source: TechCrunch | 10 Apr 2010 | 6:04 pm On Your Side: Laptop Repair Service Refused (PC World)PC World - I bought 23 Lenovo laptops from GovConnection, each with a three-year extended warranty with on-site service.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Apr 2010 | 6:00 pm Arduino Assisted Mind-Controlled Televisionandylim writes "Dcept905, aka Paul, has interfaced an EEG headset and an Arduino with an IR LED to control his television set with thought alone. 'I have finally gotten around to re-writing some of my old code and re-recording a proper demo of controlling physical objects using thoughts by interfacing an EEG headset with an Arduino. While this technology is interesting and exciting, before anyone sees this as an endorsement for this particular EEG headset, I strongly recommend reading my full review of the device.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 10 Apr 2010 | 5:53 pm Weekend Update 04.10.10- The Afterglow Edition [Digital Daily]
Kara started off the week by dispatching yours truly to join Robert Scoble in the overnight line outside the Palo Alto Apple (AAPL) store. There were a couple dozen padinistas who braved the cold to get theirs first, and we put together some videos of all the fanboy nerdery. Kara then jetted off for a couple of her signature high profile interviews and reported back to all of us at AllThingsD. Kara confirmed suspicions that Yahoo! (YHOO) CTO Ari Balogh will be leaving for family reasons, and dropped some names for possible successors. Kara rounded out her road trip with a flip video of Juniper Networks’ (JNPR) Kevin Johnson. They talked iPad, as Johnson is a pretty good guy to comment on how it may affect things like networks, for instance. John took the week off, but Digital Daily was alive and kicking, at least during the Apple OS 4 event. We liveblogged all the action from Jobs, Forstall and Schiller, right from 1 Infinite Loop. Media Memo was abuzz with an exclusive from the west coast early in the week. We ran into Chatroulette creator Andrey Ternovskiy in line while waiting for our iPad and he gave Media Memo a sneek peek of cooking attractions for the internet meem du jour. Peter then moved on to some good news about advertising, for a change. It seems that internet adds are coming back, but not as fast as media types might hope. In the same vein, Peter brought a little breakdown of Apple’s new iAd platform, and what it may mean for the media industry, how it might make developers money, and how it wont suck. Walt devoted his column this week to an all iPad followup. He answered some burning questions about the iPad, and made clear some points that had even confused Weekend Update. Mossberg’s Mailbox was full of questions about steaming video, computers for school and running Windows on a Mac. Walt always gives the straight talk, and the questions answered this week were no exception. Katie also did the iPad shuffle this week, and brought a review of some of the best apps currently offered for the new device. She broke them down well in writing, and even threw in a little video for good measure. She never dissapoints. That’s all for now from Weekend Update. We’re going to go curl up with our iPad and wifi and not come out till June. Or, at least until Kara makes us come back next week for another installment. Source: All Things Digital | 10 Apr 2010 | 5:22 pm Top 20 Trends of the Day (Apr 10) - From Military-Inspired Luxury Cars to Damsels in Deserts (COUNTDOWN)(TrendHunter.com) For the day of April 10th, these are the Top 20 trends, which include Military-Inspired Luxury Cars, Combat Couture and Discreet Fashion Earbuds. The rankings are based on hundreds...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Apr 2010 | 5:10 pm Newegg Deal: Garmin nuvi 780 GPS with MSN Direct and free caseNewegg has a nice promo code sale on the Garmin nuvi 780 GPS device, which includes 9 months of MSN Direct service thrown in at no extra charge, as well as a free case. If you're unfamiliar, the nuvi 780...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Apr 2010 | 5:00 pm Apple's Game Center: More Opportunities for Social Games DevelopersMost of the initial buzz surrounding Apple's announcement on Thursday of its new operating system, iPhone OS 4, centered on the support for multitasking. While this feature has been long anticipated by...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Apr 2010 | 5:00 pm US Justice Dept. Investigates IT Hiring PracticesZecheus writes "The Wall Street Journal (no paywall on this story) reports that the Justice Department is 'stepping up' an investigation of hiring practices of US technology firms, such as Google, Intel, IBM, and Apple. From the article: 'The inquiry is focused on whether companies, particularly in the technology sector, have agreed not to recruit each others' employees in ways that violate antitrust law. Specifically, the probe is looking into whether the companies' hiring practices are costing skilled computer engineers and other workers opportunities to change jobs for higher pay or better benefits.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 10 Apr 2010 | 4:49 pm With Tweetie Acquisition, Twitter Locks On Mobile - Wired News
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 10 Apr 2010 | 4:23 pm Researcher Uncovers (Another) Major Facebook Security Exploit
The exploit, which we’ve confirmed has now been patched, could hijack the session of a previously authorized third party Facebook application and invisibly pass it off to a malicious app. In his proof-of-concept, Tyson embedded Farmville in an invisible frame on his site. He then used some trickery with Facebook Platform parameters to pass all access rights Farmville had on to a malicious data harvesting application. In short, any of the many millions of people who had previously installed Farmville and visited the apparently benign proof-of-concept site would have their data invisibly harvested. If the user had granted Farmville additional permissions to access their Wall or messages, then the malicious app would have them too. Tyson only used Farmville in this instance because of its massive install base, but he could have used any other third party app. Fortunately, Tyson doesn’t have reason to believe this exploit has been abused, stating “It’s unlikely that any real-world attacks used this particular vulnerability, and I certainly have no record of such a case.” But he also notes that it may have existed for a year or longer. Further, Tyson thinks that Facebook still has problems with the way Platform is set up that expose it to vulnerabilities like this:
For more technical details on how the exploit worked, check out Tyson’s post. Tyson has written quite a few other articles detailing flaws with Facebook security, including his Month of Facebook Bugs, which exposed some serious issues with Facebook Platform last October (he notes that some of these have since been fixed). Information provided by CrunchBase      
Source: TechCrunch | 10 Apr 2010 | 4:21 pm Adobe Evangelist Lashes Out Over Apple's "Original Language" PolicyAn anonymous reader writes "Apple's recent decision to restrict the languages that may be used for iPhone and iPad development has provoked some invective from Adobe's platform evangelist Lee Brimelow. He writes on TheFlashBlog, 'This has nothing to do whatsoever with bringing the Flash player to Apple's devices. That is a separate discussion entirely. What they are saying is that they won't allow applications onto their marketplace solely because of what language was originally used to create them. This is a frightening move that has no rational defense other than wanting tyrannical control over developers and more importantly, wanting to use developers as pawns in their crusade against Adobe. This does not just affect Adobe but also other technologies like Unity3D.' He ends his post with, 'Speaking purely for myself, I would look to make it clear what is going through my mind at the moment. Go screw yourself Apple. Comments disabled as I'm not interested in hearing from the Cupertino Comment SPAM bots.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 10 Apr 2010 | 3:43 pm Adobe Vs. Apple War Generates Rage, Facebook Group
The group’s manifesto is:
While you would expect a club like this to attract rabid Adobe supporters (and there is a lot of that), several members expressed their longstanding support for Adobe and Apple and the difficulty of reconciling their frustration with the new SDK agreement and their fierce loyalty to Apple. As one Facebook user put it : How did we get to this point? The tension between Apple and Adobe has been simmering for quite a while, but the clear breaking point (as we all know) was the release of the new SDK agreement which essentially blocks Flash developers from the iPhone. I tried to put together an (incomplete) collection of Adobe employee reactions— from the iPad release to Adobe’s “Viva La Resistance.” In my last post, “Adobe: Go Screw Yourself Apple,” some commenters pointed out that the title was unfair because it was the words of Adobe’s Platform Evangelist Lee Brimelow and not Adobe’s official position. True, Adobe CTO’s carefully worded (sadly, less colorful) blog was the “official” response, however, Brimelow’s post and comments by several of his Flash colleagues forms an interesting constellation that outlines a deep anger. Adobe is furious. Further, as we previously noted, Adobe did look at Brimelow’s blog and let him run with it anyway— only pushing him to extract one line and add a disclaimer (the disclaimer was added roughly one hour after he sent a Twitter link to his post). First, before we look at the iPhone OS 4.0 fallout, let’s skip to somewhat happier times (to last weekend) when Adobe’s employees lined up at the Apple store to eagerly purchase Steve Jobs’ latest offering. Arno Gourdol, a member of the Adobe Air team, documents their morning: “After queuing for an hour at the flagship Apple Store in SF this morning, we finally got our hands on a stack of magical devices. We’ve spent the rest of the day having fun getting the first Adobe AIR apps running on the iPad….We have also been working on bringing up the first “HD” apps that take advantage of the gorgeous screen of the iPad.”
You can already feel the dark clouds forming. Fast forward to Thursday, developers find out that the SDK agreement will effectively ban Flash and other cross-platform development tools, like Unity, on the iPhone.
Thursday evening: Thursday 11:47pm: Friday 8:44am: Friday about 9pm: Friday 12:47pm: Friday 4:08pm: Saturday around 7:00am Saturday around 11:00 am: Anyone get the sense that this is just the beginning? Information provided by CrunchBase      
Source: TechCrunch | 10 Apr 2010 | 3:19 pm With Tweetie Acquisition, Twitter Locks On MobileTwitter has acquired atebits, the company that makes popular Tweetie applications for the iPhone and Mac OS X, and in so doingfortifies itself as a mobile communications service — that happens to have a web site you can also use.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 10 Apr 2010 | 3:14 pm Flickr Favorites AnalyzerMy friend Ruan Niemann (ruanniemann on Flickr) turned me on to a great new site that can analyze your Flickr Faves for you, Tafoni’s Flickr Favorite’s Explorer. The site will basically look...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Apr 2010 | 3:11 pm 40 Quirky Carpets - From Carpet Alarm Clocks to Trashy Ashy Carpets (CLUSTER)(TrendHunter.com) Rip up that hardwood floor and throw down one of these quirky carpets. Regular carpet is nice, but pop art carpets are better. Click through all of these quirky carpets before you...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Apr 2010 | 3:10 pm Apple Goes Where The Portals Failed: It's The Hardware, StupidSix months ago an Apple analyst told me he thought the company’s long-term goal was to become the internet’s cable TV company. I didn’t get it then. I really get it now. Most think of Apple as a computer or consumer electronics company. I think that’s becoming a means to a much bigger end: becoming a giant news, entertainment and communications network with Googillian ambitions.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 10 Apr 2010 | 3:02 pm Should Kids Be Bribed To Do Well In School?theodp writes "Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr. did something education researchers almost never do: he ran a randomized experiment in hundreds of classrooms in Chicago, Dallas, Washington and New York to help answer a controversial question: Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School? He used mostly private money to pay 18,000 kids a total of $6.3 million and brought in a team of researchers to help him analyze the effects. He got death threats, but he carried on. His findings? If incentives are designed wisely, it appears, payments can indeed boost kids' performance as much as or more than many other reforms you've heard about before — and for a fraction of the cost."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 10 Apr 2010 | 2:50 pm 'Date Night' takes early lead at U.S. box officeLOS ANGELES, April 10 (Reuters) - "Date Night," a romantic comedy starring sitcom staples Steve Carell and Tina Fey, narrowly claimed an early lead at the weekend box office in North America, according...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Apr 2010 | 2:17 pm myYearbook’s Chatter Driving 1 Million Updates A Day, 1 Billion Page Views A Month
The key, Cook says, is a feature that launched in November called Chatter (which has no relation to the Salesforce feature by the same name). Chatter is a lot like Facebook’s News Feed — it’s a stream of content recently posted by other users on the network. But unlike Facebook, which populates your feed with items from your friends, Chatter is geared more towards meeting and interacting with people you don’t know. Cook says one contributor to the feature’s popularity is the fact that you can filter what type of items you’re seeing — for example, I could elect to see only content posted by women aged 20-30 (for this reason, the site has a more flirty nature than what you’ll find on Facebook). That’s helped the feature catch on, and Chatter is now seeing 1 million user updates a day. To help boost engagement, myYearbook has borrowed features popular on other sites and incorporated them into Chatter. First, the site added Ask Me, which is a Q&A feature very similar to Formspring.me. It then added ‘Rate Me’, which lets you post a photo and have it rated by strangers (which sounds like a recipe for low self esteem, but Cook claims that people receive quite a few ’10’s). The site also plans to add a feature called ‘2 Truths & A Lie’, which is an online version of the classic game. Some of the site’s growth — the boost in unique users, in particular — is likely due to the fact that myYearbook now syndicates Chatter updates to Twitter, which direct users back to the site. But he says the rise in engagement (page views have jumped from 544 million in November to 998 million in March) is primarily from users interacting more with the site, and it’s driven by Chatter, along with the site’s redesign. Cook also points out that according to comScore, myYearbook has more page views than Twitter.com does in the United States (though he concedes that much of Twitter’s traffic comes from third party clients, and Twitter has a large international audience).
Looking forward, Cook says that the company will soon be launching applications for both the iPhone and Android. Here’s a video the site is using to promote its recent growth;
Information provided by CrunchBase      
Source: TechCrunch | 10 Apr 2010 | 2:15 pm Hot gaming news for the week of 4-04-2010Section:  No need to scour the interwebs for hot gaming news, Gamertell‘s already done that for you! Here’s a look at this week’s top stories…
Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 10 Apr 2010 | 2:00 pm Rethinking a Gospel of the Web - New York Times
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 10 Apr 2010 | 2:00 pm “I lather you.” “I know.” Han Solo soap even Greedo would love
Okay, I’ve returned to my senses. Sorry for that little outburst, I get worked up sometimes. The soap isn’t a joke, though, you can buy it (for $6.50 a bar) at Luxury Lane. “Made with pure olive oil, shea butter and aloe vera.” But with “matte and metallic pigments.” Wait, in the soap?! [via GeekLeeTist and The Awesomer]
Source: CrunchGear | 10 Apr 2010 | 1:42 pm Android Gets Carrier-Operated European App StoreAndrew Smith writes "Android fragmentation begins: EuroDroid reports that Vodafone will launch an Android app store in June, to fill in the European gaps where Google hasn't yet launched the official Android app store. Worrying quote: 'All apps will be pre-selected and tested by [Vodafone's after-sales processor] Arvato Mobile for compatibility with our devices.' Just a few days ago Slashdot covered the suggestion by Barry O'Neil, ex-President of Namco Bandai Network Europe, that it could be wise for Google to 'hand over the entire management of the Android Market to carriers, OEMs and trusted publishers.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 10 Apr 2010 | 1:41 pm UPDATE 1-Russia may lend $5-6 bln to Ukraine for nuclear buildMOSCOW, April 10 (Reuters) - Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Saturday Russia may lend $5-6 billion to Ukraine to construct two nuclear reactors, while promising to consider a new deal on...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Apr 2010 | 1:31 pm Activision Countersues Fired Call of Duty Developers (PC World)PC World - The military-minded franchise worth billions with recent record-snapping sales has another lawsuit in its lineup of legal perplexities. Activision Blizzard, publisher of the Call of Duty franchise, has countersued Jason West and Vincent Zampella, claiming the two former Call of Duty development studio executives tried to "hijack" company assets related to the war-themed first-person shooter series.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Apr 2010 | 1:31 pm Shell gets key Alaska permit for Beaufort drillingANCHORAGE, Alaska, April 10 (Reuters) - Royal Dutch Shell Plc has been granted a long-awaited federal air-quality permit the oil company needs to conduct exploratory drilling this year in Alaska's Beaufort...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Apr 2010 | 12:53 pm Alaska predicts higher oil price but lower outputANCHORAGE, Alaska, April 10 (Reuters) - Prices for crude oil produced on Alaska's North Slope will remain high but output from the aging basin will continue to slump, according to a semi-annual forecast...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Apr 2010 | 12:38 pm Electrowetting Promises Power-Sipping, Daylight Readable Color DisplaysDutch researchers are working on a new application of an old technology that could mean bright color displays that draw much less power than conventional LCDs, according to the BBC. In this application, an instance of a technique known as electrowetting, droplets of colored oil in suspension are the basis for the display's colors; each pixel's color is determined by moving the colored oils with electrical current. A prototype reader from Dutch firm Liquivista is shown in the accompanying video; color magazines with 50-60hz refresh time using this display technology are at least a few years out, though. Significantly, these screens are daylight readable, which makes me wonder how they compare to Pixel-Qi style screens in power draw, brightness, and maximum density.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 10 Apr 2010 | 12:36 pm Everything you must know about Standing Cat
Standing Cat has become quite the internet phenomenon in recent days. French internet culture journalist Aude Baron has been digging into the story behind this little guy, and writes, The cat's name is Rocky. He is 2 years old and his owners are French (Daisy and Yann). Rocky used to stand up because he couldn't see the birds through the windows, and wanted to, so he stood up. Why does he raise his leg in the middle of the video? Probably because there was a bird outside, according to Daisy, or maybe a dog wandering around. Rocky hates dogs.Video after the jump. Source: Boing Boing | 10 Apr 2010 | 12:15 pm Learn F***in' Science with Insane Clown Posse If the Insane Clown Posse and their juggalo fandom created a science textbook, this is what it would look like. Daniel O'Brien of Cracked.com, who is responsible for this here shizzle, says, Learn Your Motherf#@kin' Science: A Textbook for Juggalos To fully appreciate this, watch the music video for the ICP song "Miracles." (Cracked.com, thanks, Susannah Breslin)
Previously:
Source: Boing Boing | 10 Apr 2010 | 12:15 pm Actually, know what? Insane Clown Posse "Miracles" video is pure awesome
BONUS: Duckface at 3:30. (via Videogum)
Previously:
Source: Boing Boing | 10 Apr 2010 | 12:15 pm Microsoft won’t build phones, except for the ones revealed MondaySection: Communications, Cellphones, Email / IM, Smartphones, Mobile
Microsoft’s strategy has been build the OS and hand it off to phone makers. Apple stomped on that model by controlling the OS as well as the hardware, down to minutiae. Microsoft beat it’s chest saying MS respects phone makers and by each doing what they do best, they’ll have the better product. But that is the old way. And when the old way seems to fall flat, you do something different. Something different is exactly what Microsoft’s Pink project is all about. The devices announced tomorrow are built by another company, but consumers likely won’t know much about them. Instead, they’ll know it’s a Microsoft device under a new brand name (I suspect). These new Pink devices build on the Sidekick thanks to the 2008 Danger acquisition. The new Pink devices will be hip quick-messaging devices aimed at teens and young adults. Their texting,IM’ing and social networking chops should be more than sufficient and we expect some twists that will set the MS devices apart from say, Pantech. The Pink devices won’t rival the smartphones of the day, and they are not meant to. Instead, they are cheap, simpler phones designed for those not intent on surfing the web, downloading thousands of apps or paying hefty data connection fees. There is not a lot of branding in messaging phones and no one makes a big deal about the OS those devices run. I suspect that is going to change. Read: [New York Times] Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 10 Apr 2010 | 12:01 pm Changes: PC enthusiasts to make up less of PC gaming market
The changes in PC gaming mean that, by 2013, “PC enthusiasts” will only account for 30 percent of the dollars spent in the field. Right now, “PC enthusiasts” account for nearly half of every dollar spent, or 46 percent. Enthusiasts are people who read all those hardware sites with meticulous benchmarks and who have no problem dropping $300 on a motherboard or graphics card. I guess that makes me an enthusiast. The decline can be attributed to, in part, the increase in power in hardware. Do you really need to spend $700 on an ATI Radeon 5970 in order to play World of Warcraft or Napoleon: Total War or Battlefield: Bad Company 2? Of course not. (You may have to spend that kind of money to play Metro 2033 at the highest settings, though.) A non-enthusiast can head over to Newegg, find himself an OK ~$200 card, and go home happy. He’s still a PC gamer, but he doesn’t have to spend 900 hours researching the difference between memory brands, or spend $2,000 to play Modern Warfare 2. All of this comes from a recent Jon Peddie Research study. I guess the overall message is that PC gaming isn’t dead, if only because it’s becoming far more accessible to the average person. That’s a good thing.
Source: CrunchGear | 10 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm BOOM! Top Apple news for the week of 4-04-2010Section:  We may not cover Apple 24x7… but we know someone who does! Here’s a few of this week’s hottest from Appletell to get you started…
Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 10 Apr 2010 | 11:00 am Will AOL and Demand Media’s Content Farm Strategy Prevail?
Editor’s note: Guest author Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of video site WatchMojo. In this post he examines the two biggest content farms springing up on the Web: Demand Media and Aol. You can find his previous guest posts about online video here.
Are content farms the future of online media? Demand Media is now providing travel tips to USA Today, and Aol is supplementing its thousands of paid journalists with an even larger army of citizen freelancers. If nothing else, Demand Media and AOL deserve credit for generating excitement over content. While an octogenarian like Sumner Redstone might claim that “content is king” and a septuagenarian like Rupert Murdoch will echo that “content is not just king, it’s the emperor of all”, the so-called cool kids advertisers want to reach could care less about content. But, the fact remains, everywhere you look, it’s about content consumption and monetization. In The Collapse of Complex Business Models, Clay Shirky argues that the inertia facing TV executives stems from their desire to see “online video generate enough money to cover their current costs”. When Wired recently profiled Demand Media, owner of the eNom domain registrar, who, armed with over $300 million in venture capital is positioning itself as a low cost content creation and monetization machine, it summarized its worldview:
Not to be outdone, Aol is using its Seed.com freelance platform to produce more content at lower cost. It also recently acquired Studio Now to freelance its video content needs. Unlike Demand Media however, Aol has also hired expensive writers, leaving some to wonder what its strategy is exactly. Granted, second guessing the companies’ Web-savvy CEOs might prove foolish. Former Google ad executive Tim Armstrong is CEO and Chairman at Aol, having since hired a battalion of experienced executives. Richard Rosenblatt —the man who sold MySpace to FOX —is running Demand Media, at his side is Shawn Colo, who was as instrumental as Rosenblatt in raising the war chest currently at their disposal, and their Chief Revenue Officer is Joanne Bradford.
Mind you, an impressive background and money in the bank doesn’t guarantee success (Joost anyone?). To evaluate their strategy, it’s important to understand the market they’re coveting. In How To Make Money In Online Video, I introduced a pyramid representing super premium, premium, prosumer and user-generated content. We have now updated to reflect where each one operates.
Established and/or well funded companies should focus on the upper half of the premium space and the lower half of the super premium space. The sweet spot for smaller startups is to operate between the 50th and 75th percentile of the premium space. I think for start-ups to tackle the 76th to 100th percentile of the premium space is costly and risky (anything in the super premium space is suicide), and operating below the 50th makes it hard to create a valuable catalogue that can be licensed or secure ad dollars from premium marketers. The upper half of the super premium space should be left to Hollywood. Aol is at once attacking the lower half of the super premium space (by hiring experienced writers and producing live video segments with artists such as Beyonce), the premium space (more or less what its niche sites are doing) as well as the higher end of the user-generated space (through Seed.com and Studio Now). Will it work? I don’t know. It cannot possibly be everything to everyone at once, but it can play in the various areas to see what will do best and phase out what doesn’t stick to the wall. Demand Media, meanwhile, is clearly operating in a lower sphere, which is the area between the upper half of the UGC space up to the lower half of the premium space. This is a tough space to be in if you want branded marketers and ad agencies to sign on and give you dollars. Advertising: The Last Bastion of Unaccountable Spending in Corporate America For centuries, publishers have filtered audiences for marketers. These days, advertisers like to be next to brands: Pepsi wants to be on MTV, Budweiser on the Super Bowl. There is a science to the decision-making process, but it’s fuzzy math at best. Sometimes, marketers will point to one article or video as a reason not to run ads on a site. This could prove to be the undoing of these content farms. So while Demand Media might be printing money matching articles with search traffic and text ads, its current model will always be one questionable piece of content away from losing branded advertising deals, which to quote Google’s own CEO Eric Schmidt is “the last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America”. That might be why Demand hired Joanne Bradford, who ran ads for MSN before short stints at Spot Runner and Yahoo! Should Demand Media Move Upstream? When Demand Media acquired Expert Village (a user-generated instructional video site), it bet big on UGC, which while highly scalable and low cost is generally shunned by marketers. Before the acquisition, Expert Village allowed filmmakers to submit a) ideas for experts and b) segments they wanted to shoot. The fee was nominal, but with volume, it would be worthwhile to filmmakers and to Expert Village to boost catalog and traffic volume. After the acquisition, everything was transferred to ehow.com and that system completely changed. The new management no longer allowed filmmakers to submit just any idea; in fact, filmmakers were suddenly limited to choosing titles out of a library database on eHow. Telling a creative person that they need to choose subjects from a list in a database is not really going to work in the long term. But exacerbating matters was that this made the revenue potential less interesting for a filmmaker. Since filmmakers would oftentimes match up with an expert, this new system meant far less videos produced per shoot, which after considering the time to travel to a location and back rendered the exercise futile. Adding to the challenges was the sudden new need for graphics. Without a doubt, these little changes improved the quality of Expert Village’s library and made the videos more SEO-friendly, but by requiring more from filmmakers, Demand Media inadvertently made the quality of contributors suffer by becoming a more suitable home for novice filmmakers. So what it gained on one front through improved processes it lost through inexperienced talent. This is why folks like Slate’s Farhad Manjoo have ripped Demand Media to shreds, echoing the fact that its content is good enough to get indexed on Google’s search results but bad enough to induce users to click on a Google ad and go elsewhere (thereby generating revenue for Demand). That might actually have been one of the nicer things said about the company. Of course, it’s not what journalists have to say about the company that will matter in the end. Publishers fight for the hearts and minds of viewers/readers and marketers. So, what do marketers think? Online Content is Art and Science Successful content creation is both art and science. Costing and scalability are important considerations but the winning strategy cannot boil down to that alone. Making sure it’s SEO friendly is also important, but in a world where content is shared through social networks, it needs to strike a chord with audiences, be it readers, listeners or viewers. Video, in particular, is not even really properly indexed on search engines, so an SEO-centric strategy might be useless to begin with. I’ve covered what makes video get discovered before. But as much as venture capitalists don’t like to hear this, no amount of science will remove the art that is publishing, or the emotions that fuel marketing decisions. Video content involves production, publishing and distribution.
All in all, considering that Demand Media doesn’t have a big top-10 stand alone property, I can understand why it takes the search arbitrage approach, but AOL’s efforts undermine the reality that despite its sliding traffic from ISP users, it has a large audience base and if it produced compelling content, then it would be able to retain and grow that base. It could be argued, of course, that Armstrong is doing both: hiring the best writers to have that front and center but then turning to the world’s freelancers and users to contribute the stuff that will trip up Google’s search index and offset the fleeting ISP users. I respect that with Tim Armstrong’s background at Google, he needs to balance his vision of Aol being the Time Inc. of the 21st century with a scalable model that will get “quants” excited, but he might risk having a bad apple ruin the entire bushel by embracing the UGC freelancer base, as he did during SXSW. Meanwhile, Demand Media has enough money to experiment until it finds a solution, like Aol. At least it’s betting in the right broader space, albeit it needs to fine-tune its methodology to make the lofty investment it secured a profitable one. So long as it remains private and all it has to worry about are the journalists, then it might find its sweet spot over time. With the Web entering a phase of greater content consumption and content not being a zero-sum game, the reality is both companies can succeed with their strategies, but how big a crop their content farms will yield is still a big unknown. Photo Credit/Flickr/Andrew Stawarz      
Source: TechCrunch | 10 Apr 2010 | 10:37 am Russia may lend $5-6 bln to Ukraine for nuclear reactorsMOSCOW, April 10 (Reuters) - Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Saturday Russia may lend $5-6 billion to Ukraine to construct two nuclear reactors, while promising to think about a new deal...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Apr 2010 | 9:41 am Summary Box: Broadband funds draw complaintsTHE COMPLAINTS: Some phone and cable companies complain that the money is sometimes being used to fund networks that will compete with services they already offer. THE DEFENSE:...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Apr 2010 | 9:34 am Broadband funds stimulate laments from companiesWhen Congress included $7.2 billion for broadband in last year's stimulus bill, its goal was to bring high-speed Internet connections and information-age jobs to parts of the country...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Apr 2010 | 9:32 am Going It Alone: How to Make Your Stuff In China Adam Hocherman, 34, is an entrepreneur and founder of the consumer electronics company American Innovative in Boston, MA. Adam founded the company in 2003 with the help of the US Government's SBA loan program and is currently the 100% owner. He holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA, both from Cornell University. Adam's writings can be found on his blog at DesignTheatre.net and through his Twitter feed. He welcomes your comments. Read more about sourcing in China here.
It’s Saturday morning at 6am. I’m about to leave my Boston apartment for the first of three legs from Logan International Airport to Hong Kong via New York and Tokyo. I will arrive at 10:30pm on Sunday. Against insurmountable odds it appears that both my Boston and New York flights are on-time – an anomaly if there ever was one given that we’ve had a full week of driving rain in Boston and two feet of snow in Westchester County, just 45 minutes north of New York City where my parents told me they’ve had to sleep at a friend’s place because they’ve been without power for days. Still, never to disappoint, and despite clear sunny skies, my commuter flight from Boston to New York is delayed almost two hours on account of “missing personnel.” This conjures up images of airline top brass scrambling around to replace the guy who’s responsible for loading the salty snacks on the plane (as if) when the gate agent clarifies that our secondary officer is on his way from another city. Or maybe he overslept. Fortunately, having learned my lesson just months ago when traveling to a trade event in Las Vegas (my luggage was lost, never to be recovered to this day!) I seemingly accurately surmised that the chances of my checked baggage successfully navigating three airplanes and two carriers would be slim-to-none. As such, I had packed light. My fiancee made me pack two pair of pants, which I felt to be overkill, but I have a feeling I’ll thank her later.
Source: TechCrunch | 10 Apr 2010 | 9:16 am Going It Alone: How to Make Your Stuff In China
It’s Saturday morning at 6am. I’m about to leave my Boston apartment for the first of three legs from Logan International Airport to Hong Kong via New York and Tokyo. I will arrive at 10:30pm on Sunday. Against insurmountable odds it appears that both my Boston and New York flights are on-time – an anomaly if there ever was one given that we’ve had a full week of driving rain in Boston and two feet of snow in Westchester County, just 45 minutes north of New York City where my parents told me they’ve had to sleep at a friend’s place because they’ve been without power for days. Still, never to disappoint, and despite clear sunny skies, my commuter flight from Boston to New York is delayed almost two hours on account of “missing personnel.” This conjures up images of airline top brass scrambling around to replace the guy who’s responsible for loading the salty snacks on the plane (as if) when the gate agent clarifies that our secondary officer is on his way from another city. Or maybe he overslept. Fortunately, having learned my lesson just months ago when traveling to a trade event in Las Vegas (my luggage was lost, never to be recovered to this day!) I seemingly accurately surmised that the chances of my checked baggage successfully navigating three airplanes and two carriers would be slim-to-none. As such, I had packed light. My fiancee made me pack two pair of pants, which I felt to be overkill, but I have a feeling I’ll thank her later. Such is the life of a gadget manufacturer and if you think all of these Kindles, Blackberries, iPods, and even Nixie tubes are made by robots in some far off factory, you’re wrong. I learned, first-hand, how difficult – and how rewarding – the art of Chinese manufacturing has become. Where I’m going in China, I don’t go as a tourist. The industrial zone is not a pretty place. You can’t rent a car, even if you wanted to. There is no public transportation. Pick-ups and drop-offs are pre-arranged with factories. The good news is that the factories love when I visit or, for that matter, when any Westerner visits. There’s a certain hospitality that can be found doing business in China that doesn’t exist to such a great extent in the United States. They book the hotels for me, all meals are provided. They roll out the proverbial red carpet when I visit, which is nice. The best way to source a factory in China is to go there. For every would-be product entrepreneur whose wind I just took from your sails … relax. In fact, that is not the way that I sourced the first three factories that I ever worked with and I still work with each of those facilities to this day. I am looking forward to seeing factory owners, project managers and engineers, some of whom I’ve worked with for almost seven years. Before I tell you how I sourced those first three factories, I want to speak to the cover article of last month’s issue (Feb, 2010) of WIRED magazine about the “New Industrial Revolution”. Like many people probably reading this article, WIRED is my favorite magazine. I read it cover to cover every month and have been doing so since almost the inception of that fond rag. In that article, “Atoms Are the New Bits”, the folks at WIRED make it out like all that’s needed these days to make and sell a product is to dial up AliBaba.com, find a factory in Asia, throw a napkin sketch at them and wait for your container of packaged corporate job freedom to arrive in America. If this were true, I would not be so willing to write this article and to give you a little peak into the secret sauce that makes my company, and other companies like mine, possible today. Ok, so the AliBaba.com part is true. Personally, I prefer a competitive directory called GlobalSources.com but it’s about the same thing. Thousands of manufacturers have listings and photos of OEM items that they specialize in. So your first step is to perform a search for similar items – or rather, items that may be made similarly. American Innovative’s first product was an invention of my design called the Neverlate 7-day Alarm clock. In short, it is a clock radio that was designed with college students in mind – and facilitates a separate alarm setting for each day of the week in order to accommodate class schedules. Not surprisingly, I searched for manufacturers that made clock radios and not electric motors or stuffed bears. Seems obvious, right? Well in the case of the Neverlate it was but we’re about to release a new item that is a handheld USB device with a dot-matrix screen, which we call the PBA (Personal Baby Assistant). It’s designed to help parents of infants collect data about their newborns – sleep and eating patterns, medication administration, etc. Well who makes one of those in Asia? Hopefully no one. (Aside: If you happen to find your invention during your search for a manufacturer you may want to reassess how unique your idea is. Hopefully you’ve vetted your concept long before when you performed a detailed prior art search, but that’s a whole other article for another day). If your concept is truly new then your process is the same, but you need to be a little more creative. Recall the witch scene in the 1975 movie Monty Python and The Holy Grail. What else (besides a duck) floats? Very small rocks. What else is small and electronic, has a screen and a USB port and some buttons? An MP3 player. A fancy bike computer. A heart-rate monitor. Countless things. A factory that has some experience with these items may be a good candidate to investigate further. Find a dozen such companies and make a list. You’ve completed step one – the long list. The next step is a little harder. You need to turn the long list into a short list and here’s how you do that. Get out your spec. You do have a spec, right? Ok, get out the napkin sketch. Now open a Word document and write down exactly how your product operates from a user perspective. What do the screens look like? How does the unit respond when buttons are pressed? What are the expectations for brightness, battery life, audio quality if you’re doing a hi-fi or talking device, textile quality and texture if you’re doing a cut-and-sew, materials safety, and so forth. Sound difficult? It is if you’re not serious about your product. If you’ve been lying awake nights dreaming about making this widget, then you’ve already done the hard part – now put it down on paper. How about the external design? Regrettably it is outside the scope of this article to get into too much minutia on this subject but suffice to say that good visuals will both result in a final product that is closer to the vision in your mind and will lead potential manufacturing partners to take you more seriously. After all, it may be China but a napkin sketch there is perceived the same way a manufacturer would perceive a napkin sketch here. Do yourself a favor. Go to Coroflot.com and spend a few hundred dollars to have a bright freelancer or a RISD student work you up some drawings or, better yet, a basic 3D model. Whoa. You want me to spend money? Regrettably yes. And if you’re not willing to spend three hundred dollars for drawings then you should not be proceeding down the “go it alone” path. The trick is to spend smart money. Some good eye candy is excellent bang for the buck, particularly if it’s a 3D Alias model (which can directly feed the mechanical design stage someday). Ok, spec in hand, it’s time to turn that long list into a short list. Stay tuned for the second installment, coming tomorrow.
Source: CrunchGear | 10 Apr 2010 | 9:08 am How-To: Spring Cleaning Time For Your PC I was just reminded by a spring cleaning article that it's been quite a while since I checked under the hood of my PC. Enthusiasts know and love the process of getting air-flow-reducing dust bunnies out of their cases, but a lot of people out there (and perhaps some readers) may have never even tried it. It's actually quite easy and you should give it a shot — I put together a video this afternoon just to show the basics.
Source: TechCrunch | 10 Apr 2010 | 8:46 am Pink Preview: Microsoft's Mystery Event - PC World
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 10 Apr 2010 | 8:23 am Creative Introduces Zen SeriesSection: Audio, Portable Audio
The Zen X-Fi Style (image above) resembles the original Zen with a 2.4” display. List of specs:
On the flip side the Zen Style 100 and 300 is a compact player that has a pretty slick design.
I can see that both of these products are attempting to make a splash, but in a world dominated with phones capable of doing all of what these devices can do and more, its a losing battle. However, if you are looking for a cheap alternative that doesn’t rely on Apple or Microsoft, these might be a viable option for you. Read [Epizenter]
Full Story » | Written by Hunter Clarke for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 10 Apr 2010 | 8:00 am Get Excited and Make Things: the mug edition Matt Jones and McLaggan Smith Mugs are selling these wonderful "Get Excited and Make Things" mugs, with proceeds to a children's hospice near the McLaggan Smith factory in Scotland. Get Excited & Make Mugs! (via Warren Ellis)
Previously:
Source: Boing Boing | 10 Apr 2010 | 7:49 am Will Netflix Suffer from Delayed Gratification? - PC World
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 10 Apr 2010 | 7:46 am Copyright turns 300To commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Statute of Anne, the first modern copyright law, the British Council asked a lot of people with strong ideas about copyright, from the CEO of Random House to the founder of Wikipedia, to remark on what copyright is for and how it might be improved. Here's the short essay I contributed:Copyright 1710-2010 "For the encouragement of learning" Source: Boing Boing | 10 Apr 2010 | 7:43 am HOWTO Make a Dalek Egg Nancy Sims, a librarian and "proto-lawyer," made these absolutely wonderful egg-Daleks for a friend's birthday, fully documenting the build and putting it online so that you can make one too. Dalek Egg (Thanks, RJ!)
Previously:
Source: Boing Boing | 10 Apr 2010 | 7:36 am The Macalope Weekly: Flash in the pan (Macworld.com)Macworld.com - Whoo-eee! Apple announced the iPhone OS 4.0 features this week and Adobe is madder than a cat in a room that makes cats really mad! Meanwhile, just a week into the glorious iPad revolution, counter-revolutionary forces are in motion! The Macalope is a reasonable mythical beast (way more reasonable than the Medusa or the Kraken and yet they get all the screen time!); he realizes the iPad is not for everyone. He just wants some honest arguments.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Apr 2010 | 7:00 am US, EU Team Up To Combat Child PornographyThe United States and the European Union announced on Friday that they plan to join together to combat child pornography on the Internet. The agreement was announced at the end of an EU-US meeting of justice and interior ministers in Madrid.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 10 Apr 2010 | 7:00 am Bing Growth ContinuesComScore, an online tracking firm, said on Friday that Microsoft's internet search engine Bing increased its share of the search market in March while market leader Google dropped down. The Web analytics firm said that Bing's share of the U.S.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 10 Apr 2010 | 6:20 am Twitter Gets Official iPhone, Blackberry Apps (PC World)PC World - Twitter introduced on Friday its first official applications for smartphones, on the iPhone and BlackBerry devices. The apps are part of Twitter's bid to extend the Twitter experience on all major mobile platforms the company says. No word on official Android or Palm WebOS apps yet.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Apr 2010 | 5:43 am Apple's iPhone OS 4.0: Afterthoughts - PC World
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 10 Apr 2010 | 5:26 am Astronauts 'ready to 'rock 'n' roll' on spacewalkTwo of the astronauts aboard the orbiting shuttle-station complex are resting up for another spacewalk. Spacemen Clayton Anderson and Rick Mastracchio (muh-STRAHK'-ee-oh) will head back...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Apr 2010 | 4:48 am UN chief says "time to deliver" on climate changeUN chief Ban Ki-moon called for more political will to tackle climate change and urged Israel once again to freeze settlements to revive Middle East peace talks, in an interview with AFP...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Apr 2010 | 4:28 am
|
Remember Google’s Hell-froze-over, critically acclaimed Super Bowl ad 
Way back in February the 
Over the last few days, the web has been awash with news that Apple has 
For all the credit Facebook has received for its privacy controls and user safety, the site still falls prey to an unsettling number of 
It was inevitable. 
I've created a juggalo-friendly textbook, taking into account the song's claim that they "don't wanna talk to a scientist," who they consider to be a "lying motherfucker" intent on "getting [them] pissed." To that end, every lesson will be directly based on actual ICP lyrics, and every page will be packed with in-your-face juggalo clown-rage. Or, the best clown-rage I can muster.
To fully appreciate the 
Once upon a time, Microsoft battled Blackberry for dominance in the smartphone market. Back then, there phones were inexpensive, received email (most of the time) and if you were patient enough, surfed the mobile web. Today, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile is on the skids and has been for a few years, making only incremental changes. Microsoft is now engaged in a reset of sorts, a replacement for Windows Mobile has already been announced and next week, we’ll see a grand experiment in the Pink (presumed codename) devices.
Adam Hocherman, 34, is an entrepreneur and founder of the consumer electronics company 
Creative has just announced a few new flavors to the portable media player industry: the Zen X-Fi Style, and the Zen Style 100 and 300. All of which carry Creative’s signature style with multiple colors and interesting designs.
f there's one lie more corrosive to creativity above all others, it is the lie of romantic individual originality. Today, 'copyright curriculum' warns schoolchildren not to be 'copycats' - to come up with their own original notions.
