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Israel ends ban on iPad imports - Washington Post
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 25 Apr 2010 | 4:14 am Twitter buys Cloudhopper to become world SMS leaderAccording to Softpedia, with the Twitter's purchase of global mobile messaging company Cloudhopper, Twitter intends to become the highest volume SMS program in the world.Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Apr 2010 | 4:07 am Hubble marks 20 years in space - CNN
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 25 Apr 2010 | 3:59 am 24 Hours: Unplugged - revealing UM studyA study from the International Center for Media & the Public Agenda (ICMPA) at the University of Maryland, concludes that most college students are not just unwilling, but functionally unable to be...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Apr 2010 | 3:35 am Several Link-Spam Architectures Revealedworkie writes "Using data derived from website infections, RescueTheWeb.org has found several interesting link-spam architectures. One architecture is where concentric layers of hijacked websites are used to increase the page rank and breadth of reach (within search engine search results) of scam sites. The outer layers link to the inner layers, eventually linking to a site that redirects the user to the scam site. Another architecture involves hijacked sites that redirect the user to fake copies of Google, having the appearance that the visitor is still within Google, but in reality they are on a Google look alike that contains only nefarious links."
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Source: Slashdot | 25 Apr 2010 | 3:23 am Meet Marty Cooper - the inventor of the mobile phoneThe BBC interviews Marty Cooper - the inventor of the mobile phone. The concept of a handheld phone was his brainchild, and with the help of his Motorola team, the first handset was born in 1973 weighing...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Apr 2010 | 2:15 am Denver police arrest suspect in pinky iPad theft - Denver Post
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 25 Apr 2010 | 1:03 am Israel lifts ban on imports of Apple iPad (Reuters)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 Apr 2010 | 1:03 am Real-Time Voice Translation Coming to MobileInstant speech translation, a longtime dream of science-fiction writers, is already feasible in certain situations, vendors said at the Mobile Voice Conference in San Francisco on Thursday. NetworkWorld...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Apr 2010 | 12:56 am Wind-Blown Fashiontography - Vogue Russia May 2010 Shows Knockout Designer Duds (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) Vogue Russia May 2010 is filled with killer editorials this month, and our latest find of windblown fashiontography blows some of the others out of the park. Shot by photographer Tom...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Apr 2010 | 12:56 am Criminal Charges Possible in the Case of the Lost iPhoneAccording to Bits, authorities in San Mateo County in California are considering whether to file criminal charges in connection with the sale of a missing next-generation iPhone belonging to Apple. ...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Apr 2010 | 12:51 am Globetrotting Briefcases - The TravelTeq 'Trash' Briefcase is For Frequent Fliers (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) If you've ever had issues when you arrive at your boarding gate and have to ruffle through your bags for your ticket and such, look no further than the TravelTeq Trash Briefcase designer...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Apr 2010 | 12:26 am Japan firms to standardize mobile software: report (Reuters)Reuters - Four major Japanese electronics companies will standardize their core software platform for next-generation cellphones aimed at reducing costs and raising competitiveness, the Nikkei business daily reported on Sunday.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 Apr 2010 | 12:16 am Bridging the Digital Divide In Uganda, By Freightjtrust27 writes "Slow or non-existent internet connections have meant that the people of Uganda for the last three decades have not been able to harness the many advantages of the online economy. This social and economic exclusion of the poorest of the poor was further accentuated by the impossibility for a Ugandan to obtain a credit card or make PayPal payments — a simple requirement to be able to pay for goods and services online. Most merchants and payment gateway providers automatically block all credit cards from Africa and it is not possible to get a verified PayPal account in many African nations." Now, a Ugandan company called EasyPayUganda is helping people sidestep these restrictions, by allowing customers to make online payments by proxy in order to pay for services and goods. EasyPayUganda is also providing a logistics solution, forwarding customers shipments to Uganda, as most online merchants will not ship to Africa.
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Source: Slashdot | 25 Apr 2010 | 12:15 am The intelligent Fluent News Reader best iPhone app for news junkies (Appolicious)Appolicious - Any news junkie should look no further than the free Fluent News Reader iPhone app when it comes to a news aggregator for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 Apr 2010 | 12:00 am Modern Renaissance Breeches - The Christian Westphal Fall 2010 Collection Goes Way Back in Time (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) If you're looking at going a little more retro this fall, you may want to sample a few items from the Christian Westphal Fall 2010 collection. In this line you'll find a multitude of...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Apr 2010 | 11:56 pm ZipRealty, AppBrain lead Best Android Apps of the Week (Appolicious)Appolicious - With this week’s popular and emerging Android apps, we’re seeing a continuation of brands looking to expand their mobile presence. Several “personal assistant” apps are being launched for Android phones, especially as their rapid disperse offers a supplement or alternative to an iPhone app.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 24 Apr 2010 | 11:05 pm Extreme Plastic Surgery Shoots - 'A New Kind of Beauty' by Mr. Toledano Features Enhanced Individual (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) 'A New Kind of Beauty' by Mr. Toledano is a portrait series that shows how the individuals who pay for such startling transformations are actually no different from the rest of us...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Apr 2010 | 10:56 pm The Power Of Pull: Joi Ito And Yossi Vardi Have Pull, And So Can You (Book Excerpt)
Editor’s note: The following set of excerpts is from the recently published book The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things In Motion by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison. The excerpts are taken from throughout the book. Joi Ito, Information Magnet As the number of people we can connect with expands, our ability to pull from that network the resources and people we require to address unexpected needs expands along with it. Using the tools and platforms emerging today any of us can now find a person in a remote part of the world who just happens to have the knowledge or expertise required to help us out. This goes beyond the reasonably straightforward search engines with which we’re all familiar. Those engines are tremendously helpful. But they mostly help us access information. Today’s search engines are far less adept in connecting us to people or to products. (One of us has a friend from childhood named Jonathan Smith. We’d love to reconnect with him, but a search engine query yields more than 46 million results.) Search engines are rapidly deepening their capabilities. Meanwhile, we can supplement them with our own social networks to find what we need when we need it. Joi Ito experienced this first hand a while ago while traveling. Joi, as it happens, is about as experienced a traveler as they come. In his multiple roles as successful entrepreneur, adviser to big companies, angel investor, gamer, guild leader, and CEO of Creative Commons, Joi is rarely in one place for more than three days at a time. Now he’s in Dubai, rubbing shoulders with Pakistanis. Then to Milan for a public debate with a distinguished lawyer who’d recently called him a “pirate” in an Italian newspaper—and who will be a friend by the time Joi leaves town two days later for Tokyo. Then San Jose for a stretch, and on to Amman to meet with Princess Rym Ali of Jordan. Seasoned as he was, Joi wasn’t prepared for what happened the first time he visited India. He’d arrived in New Delhi at 3am for a conference. The hotel, when he got there, was in a sketchy area of town—too sketchy, it turns out: he’d been dropped at the wrong hotel, one with the same name as the hotel where the conference was taking place. If he hadn’t been so tired, Joi might never have gotten out of the taxi. When he turned around to look for it now the driver had left already. The lobby clerk, after Joi finally managed to wake him up, handed him half a bar of soap and a padlock for the door of a filthy, heatless room. No drinking water. No towels. No broom for the rat droppings in the corner. Needless to say, the power outlets didn’t work either. Joi was by his own admission getting nervous as he fired up his Nokia GPRS with the last of his batteries and signed on to Internet Relay Chat. Minutes later two guys living in New Delhi asked him who he was, where he was, and advised him not to go outside until morning. Then, they told him, take a right out the hotel and a left on the following street—walking neither too fast nor too slow—and soon he should be able to find a cab the heck outta there, and over to the right hotel, on the other side of town. Joi never met the two guys, either before or after they helped him. But that night in Yossi Vardi, Mr Serendipty Yossi Vardi founded his first company in 1969, when he was 27 years old. Since then he’s been an investor in, or godfather to, more than 70 Israeli tech companies. Perhaps his biggest success was the co-founding of Mirabilis, the company behind the first instant messaging technology, ICQ (“I seek you”), which AOL bought for $400 million in 1998. Yossi is also one of the best connected people in technology. “Yossi is a super-node,” British Technology executive Gary Shainberg told Business Week in 2008. Only when the apple fell from the tree did Sir Isaac Newton begin pondering the nature of gravity. Only by setting sail for India did Columbus find America. Only by trying to relieve angina did a researcher at Pfizer discover a remedy for erectile dysfunction later marketed as Viagra. Only by going to a conference to hear presentations on the future of the Internet did Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page meet Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi, who later gave them an important key for monetizing search results. The innovation Yossi suggested was deceptively simple: put a vertical line down the Google search results page, dividing paid search results on the right hand third of the page from free search results on the left hand two thirds of the page. This small visual design alteration instantly made the integrity of Google’s search results visible and apparent by separating free results from those for which advertisers had paid. The change instantly set Google apart from its primary competitors at the time, where the line between paid and free search results was unclear. The uses of serendipitous encounters and discoveries could fill a whole book. In fact, it already has—Robert K Merton and Elinor Barber’s wonderful The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity. Yet most of us, despite the role serendipity has played in our own lives— introducing us to our future spouse, perhaps, or informing us of a job opportunity—tend to think serendipity occurs on its own, a function of fate or maybe blind luck. “But serendipity doesn’t just happen in a serendipitous way,” says Yossi Vardi. “You have to work for it.” Serendipity can be methodically, systematically shaped by our choices, behaviors and dispositions. The Power Of Pull Whether it’s in online gaming, amateur astronomy, open source software development, apparel manufacturing, or online music remixing—what is it that makes one set of circumstances right for individuals or institutions to flourish while others yield weak or even depreciating results? How can a group of obscure motorcycle assemblers in China challenge the best Japan has to offer? Why does World of Warcraft remain the most popular online game, despite competing titles that keep coming along to challenge it—and failing? How can a big software company attract into a sprawling virtual community everybody it needs to get a difficult new product adopted quickly? What, in other words, does it take to turn passion into success? The common dynamic that we see underlying all of these success stories is what we call pull, the ability to connect with resources in ways that help all participants better achieve their potential. Pull gives us unprecedented access to what we need, when we need it, even if we’re not quite sure what “it” is. Pull allows us to harness and unleash the forces of attraction, influence, and serendipity. Using pull we can create the conditions by which individuals, teams, and even institutions can achieve their potential in less time and with more impact than has ever been possible. The power of pull provides a key to how all of us—individually and collectively—can turn challenge and stress into opportunity and reward as digital technology remakes our lives. The key thesis is that, unlike previous generations of institutional change—when an elite at the top of the organization created the world into which everybody else needed to fit— the changes required to harness the power of pull will be catalyzed by and driven by individuals, from the bottom up. As each of us brings into the workplace the practices we have mastered in our personal lives, the institutions where we work will be transformed, and our professional lives along with them. Not every one of us will make this leap equally willingly or at the same time. To get to pull, first we’ve got to come to grips with what push is and how it permeates our lives. Push approaches begin by forecasting needs and then designing the most efficient systems to ensure that the right people and resources are available at the right time and the right place using carefully scripted and standardized processes. Push programs have dominated our lives from our very earliest years. We are literally pushed into educational systems designed to anticipate our needs over twelve or more years of schooling, which in turn are designed to anticipate our key needs for skills over the rest of our lives. As we successfully complete this push program, we graduate into firms and other institutions that are organized around push approaches to resource mobilization. Detailed demand forecasts, operational plans, and operational process manuals carefully script the actions and specify the resources required to meet anticipated demand. We consume media that have been packaged, programmed, and pushed to us based on our anticipated needs. We encounter push programs in other parts of our lives, whether in the form of churches that anticipate what is required for salvation and define detailed programs for reaching this goal, gyms that promise a sculpted body for those who pursue tightly defined fitness programs, or diet gurus who promise we will lose weight if we eat a regimented diet. Push knows better than you do, and it’s not afraid to say, “Do this, not that!” Pull is a very different approach, one that works at three primary levels, each of which builds on the others. At the most basic level, pull helps us to find and access people and resources when we need them. Search—including Bing and Google —is an iconic example of this level of pull. There’s a wealth of data indexed and waiting for us. Quick and easy search is ideal when you know what you’re looking for. But in a world characterized by more unpredictable change, simple access has diminishing value. We are no longer certain what to look for – we even struggle to frame the questions. In this world, a second level of pull becomes increasingly valuable – the ability to attract people and resources to you that we were not even aware existed but, when you encounter them, you realize just how relevant and valuable they are. Think here of serendipity rather than search. Serendipity often occurs in social networks, where we unexpectedly encounter friends of friends or even total strangers who prove helpful. We’re not simply talking about old style networking, however, where you “work” a party or a conference for everybody who might prove useful to you. We’re not talking about the mutual back-scratching of the old-boys’ network, either, to fix parking tickets or an embarrassing situation with a relative. Nor are we talking about pulling strings behind the scenes, or making Machiavellian use of information. Anyone approaching pull in a mercenary, “what’s-in-it-for-me” fashion is likely to get burned. In These first two levels of pull—access and attraction—are ultimately static: they assume that the right people and resources already exist and that the challenge is merely to encounter them. But in a world of mounting pressure and unforeseen opportunities, we need to cultivate a third level of pull – the ability to pull from within ourselves the insight and performance required to more effectively achieve our potential. We can use pull to learn faster and translate that learning into rapidly improving performance, not just for ourselves, but for the people we connect with—a virtuous cycle that we can participate in. Serendipity is also one of the secret ingredients explaining the continued growth of “spikes”—geographic concentrations of talent around the world. The Silicon Valley engineer attends his daughter’s soccer match and happens to meet another engineer on the sidelines. In the course of their conversation, the engineer stumbles upon an interesting solution to a design problem he had been wrestling with for months. And so on. When talented individuals choose to live in spikes rather than, say, small towns or rural areas5 they’re doing so because it increases their rate of discovery, making it more likely they’ll stumble on what they need. Of course, it’s important to choose the right spike. If you’re interested in surfing (or your child is), it doesn’t do you much good to live in Washington, DC, even if it might be easier to get there. Thus aspiring country musicians move to Nashville, while up-and-coming software engineers go to Silicon Valley or Bangalore, screenwriters to Los Angeles, models to New York, and so on. Talented individuals tend to go where they have the greatest chance of running into what they need in order to take the next step, even if they don’t quite know or understand what form it will take or who might inspire it. Online communities are perfect for bringing together far-flung people who have common interests. If you want to find out what it is you don’t know that you don’t know, you need to hang out with other people who might already know it. Online social network sites like Facebook play an interesting role in all this. They help people stay in touch with their existing friends, but, increasingly, they also provide environments for serendipitous encounters with friends of friends or even people that one has never met before. Social scientists call these “weak ties”—people we barely know who can connect us to rich networks of relationships in domains completely different from ours. Competitive Advantage Comes From Being In The Flow Of Knowledge, Not Stockpiling It In markets and industries that were relatively stable, such as those in the industrial economy, a given stock of knowledge – whether it was a proprietary technology or a unique insight into how to organize production or marketing activities – could be relied upon to generate economic value for an indefinite period. The only challenges were to guard against others appropriating this knowledge and to design and execute the most efficient and scalable ways to extract value from this knowledge. What we knew yesterday—either as employees or what our institution as a whole knows about its business—is proving to be less and less helpful with the challenges and opportunities we confront today. Growing topple rates (the rate at which companies lose their leadership positions) gives powerful testimony that stocks of knowledge, no matter how valuable at the outset, are diminishing in value more rapidly. Across many industries, product life cycles have begun to compress – early success with a blockbuster product has become harder and harder to sustain. We must accelerate a shift to a very different mindset and practices that treat knowledge flows as the central opportunity and knowledge stocks as a useful by-product and key enabler. Increasingly, strategic advantage for corporate institutions will hinge on privileged positions in relevant concentrations of high value knowledge flows and the practices required to participate in and profit from these knowledge flows.      
Source: TechCrunch | 24 Apr 2010 | 10:30 pm Wooden hard drive
BP Custom Woodworks on Etsy makes these gorgeous wooden hard drive enclosures. And wine racks. Source: Boing Boing | 24 Apr 2010 | 10:26 pm Wooden hard driveBP Custom Woodworks on Etsy makes these gorgeous wooden hard drive enclosures. And wine racks.Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Apr 2010 | 10:26 pm Google taking on government censorship, Apple taking on porn for the iPhone - San Francisco Chronicle
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 24 Apr 2010 | 9:29 pm Was Flight Ban Over Ash an Overreaction?HaymarketRiot writes "Richard Branson has claimed that the flight ban, due to the eruption of the volcano Eyjafjallajokull, was an overreaction on the part of the authorities. Britain's government has even called for the airlines to be compensated. This does look like a perfect excuse for already greedy airlines to try and get more money ... any experts care to comment on the effect of volcanic ash on planes?"
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Source: Slashdot | 24 Apr 2010 | 9:26 pm 6 Million Unfollows Later, Twitter Moves To Silence ManageTwitter
As the service posted on its Posterous blog yesterday, Twitter has sent the service an email letting them know that they’re breaking one of their rules. Specifically, this is what Twitter wrote:
The problem is that ManageTwitter’s service isn’t automated at all. It simply offers up suggestions for who you should unfollow. As ManageTwitter writes:
They go on to note that they understand Twitter’s rule, but again, do not believe they are breaking it. It’s possible that the portion Twitter doesn’t like is that the checkboxes next to usernames are automatically selected for deletion (I don’t particularly like this either because most users — even many of the ones they suggest — I don’t want to unfollow) — and if so, that’s an easy fix. I have an email into Twitter asking them if that would be good enough and will update when I hear back. I can certainly see Twitter not approving of the name for trademark reasons — but they’re apparently not disputing that at the moment, just the bulk unfollow bit. Or maybe Twitter just doesn’t like the fact that ManageTwitter has managed to help 35,000 users unfollow nearly 6 million people on the service. I can’t imagine any social network would like a third-party service changing the social graph in such a way. But again, this service is very useful to many users, and I believe makes Twitter better — even if it is slightly less connected. ManageTwitter is asking that you retweet this tweet in support of them. [Thanks Courtenay] Information provided by CrunchBase      
Source: TechCrunch | 24 Apr 2010 | 7:45 pm Steve Wozniak On Apple Security, Employee Termination, and Gray PowellDuring last week’s iPhone leak saga, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, reached out with a story: The morning of the iPad launch, an engineer showed Woz an iPad for two minutes. For this he was fired. It’s a story that paints Apple as many people already see the company: ruthlessly secretive, and even vindictive. It also sheds some light on the story of Gray Powell, an Apple engineer whose breach of secrecy was at once less intentional, more severe and infinitely more public—until now. In the words of Woz ...
Source: Wired Top Stories | 24 Apr 2010 | 7:34 pm NSFW Guide to Watching Porn on your iPad
What to Watch Keep it Dry
Go Hands Free Keep it Quiet Make Sure It’s Private
We’ve given you the tools, now you can watch your iPad porn completely uninterrupted, no matter where you are. Success. Guest columnist Lydia Leavitt writes about sex and, oddly enough, social media. For more information on the latest intimate technology, check out 69adget.com. Photo by: bearotic.com
Source: CrunchGear | 24 Apr 2010 | 6:54 pm Gizmodo's iPhone Leak: "We haven't been contacted by law enforcement" - PC Magazine
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 24 Apr 2010 | 6:28 pm IEEE Introduces Mario Level-Generation Competitionbgweber writes "Last year, the IEEE conference on Computational Intelligence and Games hosted a competition to determine who could write the best AI for playing Mario levels (YouTube video). This year, the conference has expanded the competition to include a track on level generation as well, where the goal is to generate new levels online procedurally. Submitting an entry is as easy as implementing a Java interface that performs procedural content generation. The implications of this competition are techniques for greatly increasing the replayability of games, since each gameplay session could present new levels to the player."
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Source: Slashdot | 24 Apr 2010 | 6:04 pm Open Source Router To Replace WRT54GL?jeremyz writes "With the inclusion of 802.11n in more and more Wi-Fi devices, the WRT54GL is losing its usefulness, even though it's still the de-facto standard for open source, Linux-running wireless routers. I've been looking around for a 802.11n router to replace the WRT54GL, but haven't really found anything besides the Netgear's WNR3500L. At first look, the WNR3500L looked great, but after some further investigation, I found that Netgear hasn't released all of the source, as they should have to comply with the GPL. Are there any good 802.11n routers to replace my aging WRT54GL?"
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Source: Slashdot | 24 Apr 2010 | 5:58 pm Wait, HP has a Wiimote too?
Apparently without fanfare, or even an announcement, the Swing is coming bundled with mid-range Pavilion desktops over on the sub-continent. And according to the source, HP is claiming it’s the first time motion control has been available on the PC. HP, it’s good to do research before making claims like that. I should know — I’m the world’s smartest mancitation needed. It does have one distinguishing feature, however: it looks like a peanut. There’s a big market for that among bonobos and ungulates aged 7-14. [via Engadget]
Source: CrunchGear | 24 Apr 2010 | 5:54 pm EComStation 2.0 GA To Be Released May 14martiniturbide writes "After a long delay, eComStation 2.0 GA will finally become reality. It will be released in time to be presented at the Warpstock Europe 2010 event which will be held in Trier, Germany, from May 14 to 16. We consider eComStation 2.0 to be the biggest overhaul of OS/2 so far. Together with a team of both hired and volunteer developers, we have extended the functionality, removed limitations, updated hardware support as far as possible, and resolved close to 1000 issues that had been reported since the release of eComStation 1.2R. The new eComStation 2.0 GA is the result of several years of combined efforts and investments."
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Source: Slashdot | 24 Apr 2010 | 4:50 pm Looking Back at 1984 Report On "Radical Computing"An anonymous reader writes "The Department of Defense has just released a long restricted report (PDF) by the JASON group entitled Radical Computing. This 1984 study outlines a number of alternate computing methods that could 'result in a radical improvement in computing.' The study attempts to explain the paradox of how the Russian lag in developing VLSI chips curiously did not critically hinder their accomplishments in space missions, ICBMs and chess computation. The authors speculate that the Russians might have achieved breakthroughs in alternative computing methods such as residue arithmetic and symbolic computing. (More cynical types assume the Russians bought or stole US chips from the French or other too-helpful go-betweens.)"
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Source: Slashdot | 24 Apr 2010 | 3:46 pm Germans form human chain in nuclear protestTens of thousands of Germans joined hands to form a human chain to protest against nuclear energy Saturday, two days before the 24th anniversary of the worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Apr 2010 | 2:59 pm Tornado Hits Miss., Leaves Swath of DestructionTornadoes killed more than six people in Mississippi and injured many others.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 24 Apr 2010 | 2:45 pm LOFAR Telescope Array Grabs First Pulsar Imagesvikingpower writes "LOFAR, the LOw Frequence ARray radio telescope, under construction in the north of the Netherlands, saw its first pulsars (English translation of Dutch original) — through coupling it with radio telescopes in Germany and France. LOFAR is sensitive to wavelengths as long as seven meters, and will be inaugurated on June 12 of this year."
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Source: Slashdot | 24 Apr 2010 | 2:42 pm Weekend Update 04.24.10- The Maltese Falcon Edition [Digital Daily]
Kara stayed above the fray this week by opening up with a signature exclusive. She lunched with Ben Horowitz and got his take on why Andreessen dropped out of e race to fund Foursquare. Kara then got to look forward to some Bartz baiting, as she prepared for Yahoo’s (YHOO) earnings call. It should be noted that Bartz baiting is the official past time of residents of Boom Town. It turns out that Yahoo! Did well this past quarter, even if revenues were still a little soft. Kara rounded out a solid week of reporting with a second exclusive that made use if her stealth-mode penetrating radar (we hear she had it installed back in the Reagan administration). She peeked under the blanket of Kakai, one of the Valley’s stealthiest startups and saw a Kindle for students. She couldn’t get much more, but we know that the company has a red phone to Chegg, the online textbook rental service, so the pieces are coming together. John made it back from Europe this week, and now that the Volcano has settled down, it was time for Digital Daily to be truly daily again. Early in the week, John reported on the loss of some very important intellectual property by a tech giant. No, German beer was not involved. It turns out that the sensitive stuff hackers got a hold of during a recent attack on Google (GOOG) was the source code to their single sign on system that interacts with all the Googley services that seem to make the world go ’round. Tuesday, he reported the action as Apple (AAPL) trotted out their new, lengthier bank rolls on their earnings call. It was a good last quarter for Apple. Hopefully the unfortunate start to this one doesn’t get them down. John finished up the roller coaster week with a post about how it’s not just girls dressed up in animal ears that are huge in Japan. Apparently, so is the iPhone, which has now dominated near 75% of the Japanese smartphone market. Weekend Update expects it to continue to loom over Tokyo, at least until Mothra shows up. Peter was still on baby hiatus this week, so Media Memo was a little sparse, but he managed to post a couple stories to tide us over untill he returns in earnest. It turns out that Rolling Stone may be waking from its Rip Van Winklesque sleep and entering the digital age. And get this, they are going to charge for content. Tuesday brought news that blog platform Tumblr raised another $5 million from VCs. It seems that they aren’t done yet either. Tumblr will also be coming for the money of its users, with a monetization strategy that includes some of the usual suspects; pay premium service, virtual goods and the like. Peter finished the week with a point to ponder about the upcoming pay plans from Hulu. $10 a month seems to be the number filtering out of the reporter pool, but Peter wonders if $120 per year will be a little steep for consumers and a still not quite enough to pay for Hulu’s own bills. At least Tumblr can take stock in knowing that even big businesses have trouble making money on the Web. Walt reviewed the HTC HD2 this week in an attempt to answer the age old question, “How big is too big?” The device, currently on sale from T-Mobile, boasts a giant 4.3 inch (diagonal) screen. Walt didn’t think size was an issue, as the screen was nice and still portable. The issue came in the software and ease of use. It didn’t measure up to the big players in the market, and in the end, it doesn’t matter how big the screen is if you can’t use it for much. Mossberg’s Mailbox was headlined by a question about social games on the iPad, and Walt relayed the sad news that there would be no Mafia Wars on the iPad, at least not yet. He also demystified Apple TV, which even confuses Weekend Update from time to time. Katie finished up the week with a review of a new sort of service in the cloud. ICyte saves Web pages for later reading, even if the site changes or goes offline. It allows users to share these snapshots of sites, as well as spreading them around the social Web. Katie used the free version of the service, which is ad supported, and had good things to say overall, and thought it might be especially useful for people who do a lot of research online. It’s been a long, stressful week for all of us here in the tech media space, and Weekend Update is going to sign off now and head over to our local watering hole for beer and some downtime with friends. As an added precaution, we’ve duct taped our iPads to our arms. Wouldn’t want to leave them by accident. Source: All Things Digital | 24 Apr 2010 | 2:15 pm The Tribune Company Finds An Audience For Homegrown Hyperlocal News Site ChicagoNow
As AOL pours $50 million into its hyperlocal news site Patch.com to expand its sites around the country, smaller competitors are maintaining confidence that their platforms can survive AOL’s aggressive content strategy. Outside.In CEO Mark Josephson told GigaOm recently that he welcomes Patch into the space, because the site provides more content for his hyperlocal news aggregator to source. But what about the future of existing, local news sites in cities, such as the Tribune’s ChicagoNow, which has a similar model to Patch? While Patch hasn’t reached Chicago yet, we hear that it will be arriving soon. So is there room for a few hyperlocal news sites in one city? Digital VP for the Chicago Tribune Bill Adee says yes. In fact, ChicagoNow has seen considerable success since its launch last August. ChicagoNow, the brainchild of Adee and Editorial DirectorTracy Schmidt, is a network of 350 blogs from individuals all around greater Chicago that report on local happenings trends, events and community news. Bloggers are incentivized to write by earning $5 per 1000 local page views. While the site has a number of editors, the content is purely generated by the bloggers. And editors don’t proofread any of the content; bloggers have the power to post whatever they’d like. That being said, ChicagoNow requires that writers sign an agreement taking full legal responsibility for any content written in their posts. On the content side, blogs range from ArtTalkChicago to Chicago Baseball Stories to Chicago Political Commentary. While bloggers provide the content, editors help with SEO, socializing content, SEO, and interlinking of content. ChicagoNow even holds educational blogging seminars for its contributors. Besides traditional display advertising, ChicagoNow also offers advertisers the ability to post “adverblogs,” which is sponsored content from local advertisers. One of my criticisms of the site is that it seems difficult to navigate, and content is not streamlined. But ChicagoNow is completely redesigning its site with a more powerful search technology, courtesy of Loud3r. Not only is the site’s search is getting an overhaul, but the entire site has been redesigned with a sleeker, more user-friendly interface. In March, ChicagoNow saw 1.5 million unique visitors and 15.5 million page views according to Omniture. Adee says the company has grown every month in terms on unique visits. That’s not too shabby, considering that site is still fairly young and experimenting with a new model. So is ChicagoNow’s model the magic formula to hyperlocal news? Schmidt says that there’s more than one model that will work in terms of serving relevant content to local audiences. But she does highlight the fact that the site allows both bloggers and visitors to discover localized content that is interest-focused on niche topics within a community, such as public schools, neighborhood crime, jazz in Chicago, healthcare in the area, public transportation and more. It’s important to note that the Chicago Tribune and the Tribune Company are investing money and resources into developing a homegrown hyperlocal news initiative as opposed to acquiring a local or national site or model that is doing the same thing. AOL acquired Patch for $7 million last year and MSNBC acquired hyperlocal news aggregator EveryBlock. It should be interesting to see how ChicagoNow fares when Patch does arrive, with its war chest of funding. ChicagoNow also faces competition from the Chicago News Cooperative, which provides local news and coverage of the Chicagoland area for The New York Times. Information provided by CrunchBase      
Source: TechCrunch | 24 Apr 2010 | 2:00 pm What Happens When IPv4 Address Space Is Gonedarthcamaro writes 'We all know that IPv4 address space is almost all gone — but how will we know when the exact date is? And what will happen that day? In a new report, ARIN's CIO explains exactly what will happen on that last day of IPv4 address availability: '"We will run out of IPv4 address space and the real difficult part is that there is no flag date. It's a real moving date based on demand and the amount of address space we can reclaim from organizations," Jimmerson told InternetNews.com. "If things continue they way they have, ARIN will for the very first time, sometime between the middle and end of next year, receive a request for IPv4 address space that is justified and meets the policy. However, ARIN won't have the address space. So we'll have to say no for the very first time."'
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 24 Apr 2010 | 1:37 pm Blippy Leaks Fifth Credit Card Number to Google's Cache - PC Magazine
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 24 Apr 2010 | 1:34 pm Telescopes, Astronauts, and a Hopeless RomanticAstronaut Soichi Noguchi took a photograph, from orbit, of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) site high in the Chilean Andes. But the extreme location of ALMA means few astronomers will actually go there.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 24 Apr 2010 | 12:59 pm UK's super-rich get even richerHere come the oligarchs: Britain's super-rich see their wealth jump by 30% in the past year. It's a new record.Source: Boing Boing | 24 Apr 2010 | 12:44 pm Protect your copyrights, boycott DRM-locked platformsMy latest Publishers Weekly column, "Can You Survive a Benevolent Dictatorship?" looks at the competitive risks of selling books, articles and other copyrighted works for iPad-like devices that use DRM to prevent your readers from switching to competing platforms.Apple will tell you that it needs its DRM lock-in to preserve the iPad's "elegance." But if somewhere in the iPad's system settings there was a button that said, "I am a grownup and would like to choose for myself which apps I run," and clicking on that button would allow you to buy e-books from competing stores, where exactly is the reduction in elegance there?Can You Survive a Benevolent Dictatorship?
Previously:
Source: Boing Boing | 24 Apr 2010 | 12:36 pm Proof of Concept For Ajax Without JavaScriptJonathansCorner.com writes "Even if Ajax was backronymed to 'Asynchronous JavaScript and XML,' it works with JSON substituted for XML. Here's a proof of concept that JavaScript/VBScript are not strictly necessary either. The technique, besides being used standalone, may be useful to provide a better 'graceful degradation' for Ajax applications used by clients with scripting turned off."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 24 Apr 2010 | 12:35 pm Hubble Space Telescope celebrates its 20th birthday with ridiculous photo
It was 20 years ago today that NASA (working in conjunction with the European Space Agency) launched the Hubble Space Telescope into the heavens—well, a low Earth orbit, at least. I recall some of the buzz back then along the lines of “What a giant waste of money!” Once they fixed that mirror, it was smooth sailing. I mean, look at this! NASA’s using this photo to celebrate the telescope’s twentieth birthday. NASA calls it a “turbulent cosmic pinnacle,” and it’s somewhere within the Carina Nebula. It’s 7,500 light years away from us here on Planet Earth. In other words, the image (the light) you’re looking at right now took 7,500 years to reach our eyes. You quite literally looking into the past, ladies and gentlemen. Or the other way around: let’s say there’s some sort of friendly Space Alien somewhere in the cloud of dust. He’s looking at Planet Earth with his telescope, and he’s seeing the year 5490 BCE. He doesn’t even know we have the iPad yet! You’re encouraged to download the 12.01MB PDF to see the full resolution image.
Source: CrunchGear | 24 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm Multiplatform app stores reach beyond smart phonesDENVER (Billboard) - Offering 150,000-plus apps that have been downloaded more than 2 billion times, Apple's App Store is far and away the leading source of mobile applications driving...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Apr 2010 | 10:49 am YouTube fame yields record deal for R&B rookie (Reuters)Reuters - Singer/songwriter Dondria thought someone was pulling a fast one when she began receiving e-mail messages on her YouTube and MySpace sites from someone calling himself Jermaine Dupri. So she ignored them. But the sender persisted until Dondria decided to take a chance and call.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 24 Apr 2010 | 10:48 am Weekend Giveaway: Slacker Radio Plus subscription and a pony
While I don’t want to suggest that you people are lazy (you are), I do want to offer you slackers two one year subscriptions to Slacker Radio Plus and three three-month subscriptions. With these subscriptions you get:
Sounds great, right? (Note the fine print about the pony. You don’t really get a pony.)
Source: CrunchGear | 24 Apr 2010 | 10:16 am EU approves Bulgaria's long-delayed CO2 emissions planThe European Commission has approved Bulgaria's long-delayed 2008-2012 carbon plan, allowing industries to start trading in carbon credits, the ministry of environment and water said...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Apr 2010 | 10:00 am YouTube at age five a growing player in online films (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 24 Apr 2010 | 9:59 am Like a candle in the wind, iPod Touch with camera appears and disappears on eBay
And you thought Giz was the only game in town when it came to Apple dev units. Some folks on eBay posted two development iPod Touches with cameras placed at the center of the rear panel and running some odd variant of OS X. It’s not huge news – we knew the Touch was getting a camera eventually – but if you had designs on these things, think again. eBay just pulled them. 9to5mac grabbed all of the images and slapped them up before the auction ended prematurely.
Source: CrunchGear | 24 Apr 2010 | 9:58 am German nuclear protesters form 120-km human chainBERLIN, April 24 (Reuters) - Opponents of nuclear power formed a 120-km (75-mile) human chain between reactor sites in Germany on Saturday to protest against government plans to extend the power plants'...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Apr 2010 | 9:54 am Russia launches US satellite into spaceA Russian Proton rocket carrying a US AMC 49 telecommunications satellite was launched into orbit on Saturday, the Russian space agency said on its website. "At 3:19 pm (1119 GMT), we...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Apr 2010 | 9:37 am Mallinson: Network neutrality dysfunctionality - FierceWireless
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 24 Apr 2010 | 9:10 am “Dear Steve:” Campaigns that tried to change Apple (and failed)FROM APPLETELL - There have been a lot of pixels spilt on the Internet from industry professionals who want Apple to change its secretive ways and be more “open.” But will Apple change? History says “no,” and for good reason. Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 24 Apr 2010 | 9:08 am Flight Bans, Volcanoes And Our ClimateIceland’s volcanic eruption, which grounded air traffic for days, may provide rare clues as to how flights encourage climate change, adding to evidence from a ban on US flights after the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, according to a recent Reuters report.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 24 Apr 2010 | 8:37 am Ditch the Biz Plan, Buy a Lottery Ticket
Most of the young entrepreneurs I meet have grown up reading stories about how, during the dot-com days, all you needed was a PowerPoint and a geeky smile to get a venture capitalist to throw millions your way. True, some really dumb companies were funded during those days, but nearly all of these companies (and their investors) went down in flames. It was just the few, random, successes that reaped the fortunes. Investors have grown much wiser since then (and will probably stay this way until the next bubble). The reality is that the vast majority of startups don’t receive any VC or angel funding. Ask any VC about how many business plans they receive every month; it is in the thousands. And how many of those companies do they fund? Maybe one or two. Not great odds, are they? My research team did a study of successful companies in a variety of high-growth industries (in which VCs like to invest): those that made it out of the garage and had real products and revenue. We found that only 10.8% of them raised venture capital at any stage of their growth. In other words, nine out of ten didn’t get venture financing. Similarly, only 9.2% received angel financing. Here is another interesting statistic: according to the Venture Economics database, only 4.6% of venture capital went, over the last decade, to startup/seed-stage companies. So even the one in ten that received venture financing likely got this in later stages of its growth, not at the seed stage. Where did successful companies’ founders get their financing from? Seventy percent used personal savings, 15% took bank loans (probably on their credit cards), and 14% relied on friends and family. (Note: they typically use more than one source for financing.) The way the system works is that if you build something of value, the money will find you. Yes, there is a catch-22: you need seed financing, but no one will give you a cent until you have a marketable product and your company is producing revenue—which means that you don’t really need the money. But that’s the way it goes. Ironically, raising millions of dollars is usually easier than raising thousands. I’ve founded two tech companies, and we raised close to $100 million in private and public financing over the years. I bootstrapped my second startup up to the point that I had VCs tripping over each other to fund it. My advice for entrepreneurs in industries with relatively low capital costs (like internet/software) is to bootstrap. Of course, you can start by trying raising venture or angel capital when you have just an idea (you never know, you might get lucky); but don’t waste too much time on it. And don’t get discouraged if they turn you down; you are in the majority. Instead, focus on validating your idea, building it, and selling for survival. You’ll have to raise the money to get started by begging and borrowing from family and friends. Be prepared to dip into your savings and credit cards, obtain second mortgages, and perhaps look for consulting work or customer advances. There is no single recipe for bootstrapping a company, but there are some essential ingredients. Here are some pointers:
You’ll find that it is much easier to raise capital after you’ve had success. In our research, the percentage of company founders who raised venture capital increased from 10.8% to 26.3% after they had started a few companies. This isn’t surprising: by this time, you have experience and, with luck, some savings; you’re street-savvy and have good industry contacts; and you don’t need venture capital—that’s when you become most attractive to VCs and they come knocking on your door. Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.      
Source: TechCrunch | 24 Apr 2010 | 8:30 am Roundtable Concepts has Launched the Official Licensed UCF Knights HDTVSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Apr 2010 | 8:02 am How The iPad Will Change The iPhone Game Industry
Apple is hailing the iPad as a “magical” and “revolutionary” device. Perhaps, but the feature set accompanying the first version leaves many of us skeptical of that claim. We’ve all seen tablets before and we’re already seeing similar ones coming out soon with better specs. What we need to consider more than the device itself are the effects its release will have on the market. The iPad could potentially usher in a new set of casual users who may not already be iPhone or iPod Touch owners. This is good for business across the board, but the area that may be impacted the greatest is the iPhone gaming industry.
The first is price point. Given the average game is sold for $.99 and the most expensive are $9.99, App Store prices differ wildly from other game markets. Even the downloadable casual games industry spans $10 – $20 on average. Think about this. Many of these are the same games that get ported to the iPhone. Not only are the games the same, but the target demographics as well. So how did this happen? The fault lies with developers and consumers alike. Price is extremely psychological and both sides equally contribute to setting that standard. Prior to being involved in the iPhone industry, I worked for years in the casual games space. I saw the evolution of downloadable gaming go from the traditional core download.com-style shareware model to a full-blown casual gaming industry that catered primarily to 40-something women. To say the least, it was a stark contrast. Now, the most interesting component was seeing how price was affected when it moved from the underground to the mainstream. In the old shareware days, pricing was not uniform. It was the Wild West. But when the big guys (AOL, Yahoo, EA, PopCap, Big Fish, etc.) started to catapult the casual space, pricing had to be regulated for the psychological comfort of mainstream audiences. At the time, the sweet spot was $19.99. Some of those portals would sometimes try to undercut one another, but in the consumer’s mind, it felt suspect to pay significantly less. Alternatively, these portals went another route – subscription services, which offered deeply discounted pricing models. I bring this up to provide a better understanding of pricing psychology. It first starts with what the industry as a whole unofficially agrees the average price of a similar product should be. This is determined with some guesswork and tweaking, while waiting to see what the market will bear. As time goes by, competitors start to undercut each other and the industry either follows suit or holds steady to that original average. Unfortunately, the iPhone game industry chose the former. I say ‘unfortunately’ because it is severely crippling the gaming space. When the 3G was first launched, $9.99 was the average price of a decent, quality game. At the time, it was a fantastic price when we considered what DS games, downloadable titles and even those budget CDs at Walmart cost. This was not a lasting trend, though. As more developers flooded the market, prices continued to be pushed lower and lower. What drove this price drop was mainly gimmick apps and cheap games. The problem was that even though these products were clearly of lesser value and depth, the damage had already been done. In the minds of the consumers, paying $10 for an iPhone app, let alone more, had become a huge stretch. Instead of buying a new title at $9.99, most consumers simply waited for “the drop” – the inevitable price slash that developers enacted shortly after a game’s release. It was no longer a value proposition; it was a somewhat illogical psychological standard that had been created. Most developers had to learn to flow with this changing market, embracing the fact that shear volume could often make up for their development costs. Typically though, these development efforts were focused on low-priced impulse apps. This is where the damage to the industry comes in. Since expected pricing is so low, it discourages quality game contenders from entering the space. The cost investment is still high to produce a quality product, especially considering the average sale prices are so low. To address this problem, one rumor we heard a number of months ago was the possibility of Apple opening a premium game space on the App Store. The intention would be to feature higher priced, higher quality games. So far, nothing has come of this. In effect, this is keeping the iPhone gaming industry as still just typical mobile fare, with the occasional big game. As much as Apple wants this to be a serious competitor to the DS/PSP, it will never make it unless there is a shift. Indirectly, this is where the iPad comes in. The iPad is not a pocket product One of the biggest reasons that gimmicky apps and quick pick-up-and-play games have done so well is because the iPhone and iPod Touch are products that fit in your pocket. Typically, you take them everywhere and they are always within reach. This allows for the majority of use to occur within short periods of time (i.e. waiting in line, on the bus, during a boring meeting, etc.). To fill the needs of those sorts of time constraints, short-use applications fit the bill. This limits the desire for a deep experience or time consuming game. The iPad changes this. As a device that works as an in-between for your mobile device and your desktop, the time use allowance goes up dramatically. In most situations, you won’t pull out your iPad while waiting in line at the post office. It won’t be carried everywhere you go. While some will treat it as a netbook substitute, I anticipate a lot of its use will occur casually at home. Since the iPad is not a pocket-sized device like the iPhone and iPod Touch, time constraints become less of an issue. This means that bite-sized games or gimmicks will feel less at home here. Something like Doodle Jump will most likely not do so well on this platform. This is likely to cause the market to desire more fulfilling experiences, especially in the games space. In effect, developers will respond accordingly to meet this new market need. This acts as one phase of the changing landscape. Price sensitivity will go down There is an additional psychological component that hasn’t yet been addressed in regards to pricing: size does matter. Whether it makes sense or not in terms of value proposition, the actual size of a product can have some bearing on how we perceive its value. The small screen size of the iPhone and iPod touch causes us to perceive, whether consciously or unconsciously, that the applications are worth less than something you can interact with on a big monitor. Diner Dash on the iPhone is identical to Diner Dash on the PC. Yet, the price points are dramatically different. One aspect is market-determined pricing averages and the other is perceived value. Many consumers perceive a higher value from their larger screened PC experiences. The additional screen real estate of the iPad makes apps feel more like “real” applications. Visual interaction with the iPad screen feels closer to that of a monitor or TV. It removes the notion of the “pocket-sized time waster” and seems to provide a more substantial experience. Take a game like Civilization Revolution. Which experience feels more enriching: playing it on the small screened iPhone or playing it on a full sized device with many times the screen real estate? Despite being the same game, more breathing room provides for a deeper and more enjoyable experience. This will start a new cycle for the App Store. Reduced price sensitivity will create opportunities for deeper games and apps, which will then help set a new pricing standard. $.99 gimmicks will always exist, but now alongside a new wave of higher quality products. The goal of developers is to increase revenue at every possible avenue. This means creating a product that can span multiple platforms. Unless highly specialized, apps work just as well on the iPod Touch as they do on the iPhone. The same should hold true for the iPad. By reducing focus on one of the platforms, you start losing a whole market segment – and additional revenue source. However, simply upscaling current applications is a very short-sighted solution. It is a way for Apple to capitalize on the 150k+ apps out there for their new device, but this isn’t going to work for the longterm. Using an application unoptimized for a larger device, and not tailored for the iPad’s greater screen real estate, will feel like a tacked on experience. Because of this, more users will want to download iPad-specific applications to take advantage of their shiny new device. For some products, such as 3D games like N.O.V.A, upscaling may not be an issue. These games can scale with ease, with only slight modification to interface images. But for the rest of the app work, doubling the pixels is going to be a complete mess. Now what effect does this have on gimmicky apps and games? It forces these developers to rethink their model. As we discussed, when you develop an app, you want to capitalize on all revenue streams possible. If you produce a product that only makes sense on the iPhone, you will miss out on new opportunities provided by the iPad. Short lived gimmicks and micro-gaming experiences are unlikely to fare well on the iPad. The effect of this realization may likely cause a decline in small sized, $.99 apps as a whole. There will always be a place for these, but to really maximize profit potential, focusing on them solely is a short-sighted plan. The iPad is a device that may be misunderstood for a while. It’s certainly not revolutionary in the typical sense, but its subtle influences may eventually justify that characterization. We can surely expect to see even more casual users jumping on the band wagon and certainly a spike in casual game development for the device. As the product evolves, becoming more powerful feature-rich, it may become even more ubiquitous than we expect. This will be an extremely interesting space to watch within the coming months and years. Information provided by CrunchBase      
Source: TechCrunch | 24 Apr 2010 | 8:00 am Daily Crunch: Demolition Edition
Meet the robot enforcer: The Husqvana DXR 310 demolition robot
Source: CrunchGear | 24 Apr 2010 | 7:47 am Lisa Rein performing in NYC tonight!
Singer/songwriter and BB pal Lisa Rein writes, "I'm performing for the first time in New York City on April 24 at the Duplex Cabaret Theatre at 61 Christopher Street in the West Village at 10pm."
Lisa Rein and George Kelly - LIVE - April 24, 2010
(Thanks, Lisa!)
Driving With Your Eyes, Not Your HandsIf you are tired of turning your steering wheel left and right all day while on the road, here’s something for you: New technology developed by German researchers that lets drivers steer their vehicles using only their eyes.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 24 Apr 2010 | 7:05 am Webcams Provide Look At Volcanic EruptionMore than four million Internet users from 150 countries are watching the Iceland volcano eruptions via webcams transmitting the activity live online. The webcams have been transmitting the feed since the volcano began erupting on April 14, according to the site administrator.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 24 Apr 2010 | 6:25 am Climate Change: Whale Poop To The Rescue!Australian scientists say that whale feces are a likely element in the fight against climate change. Experts from the Australian Antarctic Division discovered that whale feces effectively place a plant-friendly fertilizer into ocean water.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 24 Apr 2010 | 6:10 am Parents Magazine and Parents.com Supply Baby Shower Ideas, Baby Shower Invitations and Baby Shower ThemesSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Apr 2010 | 6:00 am GSW IPO to price price shrs between 15-18.50 eurFRANKFURT, April 22 (Reuters) - Property company GSW seeks to place 140 million euros worth of shares when it lists on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange on May 7, adding to a growing list of companies that...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Apr 2010 | 5:59 am IMVU Hits $40 Million Annual Revenue Run Rate
Yesterday at the Startup Lessons Learned conference in San Francisco, Brett Durrett, James Birchler and Timothy Fitz from avatar-based social network and 3D virtual world IMVU took the stage and talked about scaling startups (worth your time). IMVU CEO Cary Rosenzweig didn’t come speak at the event, but was featured in a video preview on the event website (third video on that page). In this video – I’m not sure how long it has been online already – Rosenzweig boasts about the company’s profitability and cites its annual revenue run rate, which he says is now at $40 million. This means that if you multiplied the company’s current monthly revenue times 12, you’d get $40 million. Notably, that’s up from a $25 million annual revenue run rate back in October 2009. That’s a lot of growth in income in roughly half a year. So how did revenue increase? Simple: more users buying and earning credits in the 3D world and buying virtual goods, such as clothing for their avatars to furniture for their virtual rooms. On a sidenote: in charge of revenue generation at IMVU is Lee Clancy, formerly Senior Director for Community Products at Yahoo. IMVU was founded in 2004 and is backed by $29 million in venture capital, raised over 4 rounds. The company employs 60 people in Palo Alto, California, according to its website. In October, the company claimed more than 40 million registered users and 6 million unique visitors per month (numbers they also use on their about page), but I’ve been unable to retrieve more recent numbers. (Thanks to Kyle Mulka for the heads up) Information provided by CrunchBase      
Source: TechCrunch | 24 Apr 2010 | 4:57 am RPT-WPP keen on digital buys but sees prices inflatedLONDON, April 23 (Reuters) - WPP , the world's biggest advertising group, is keen to buy more agencies that specialise in digital marketing but considers current prices high, its chief executive said on...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Apr 2010 | 4:17 am
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Hardly a day goes by when I don’t have a rookie entrepreneur ask for advice on raising money from VCs. They usually have a fancy-looking business plan with detailed spreadsheets showing how their company will be worth billions by capturing just 1% of a market. All they need is some financing, and they’ll take the world by storm. My advice is always the same: ditch the business plan, and buy a lottery ticket. Your odds are better, and you’ll suffer less stress.
This guest post was written by Alex Ahlund, the CEO of 
The current iPhone and iPod touch gaming landscape consists of pick-up-and-play micro games, watered down console ports, and some in-between titles. It’s hard to consider the iPhone a true gaming platform. The lack of physical buttons, coupled with the scarcity of deep, quality titles, may prevent the iPhone from ever becoming a true competitor to the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP. Unfortunately, there are even more issues that further intensify this problem. 
