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BBC Adds Twitter And Facebook To Socialise Its On Demand Service The BBC's video on demand service, iPlayer is introducing social networking features which should further boost the uptale of Twitter and Facebook in the UK - as if they needed any boosting. The new iPlayer Beta is set to go live officially at the end of June.
Twitter, Facebook and Windows Live Messenger will be linked to a user's "BBC ID" which they get when they register on BBC.co.uk. Users will be able to share what they're watching over social networks (queue lots of "Watching Britains Got Talent" updates) while Windows Messenger will show in real-time how many minutes a user is in to a program on iPlayer and allow them to sync viewing with friends and chat about the show in realtime. The features will also work for BBC radio stations.
Source: TechCrunch | 26 May 2010 | 4:13 am Nitro PDF Reader 1.1.1.13 beta - Techtree.com
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 26 May 2010 | 4:11 am Space shuttle Atlantis aims for morning touchdown - The Associated Press
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 26 May 2010 | 4:11 am New fiction: "The Jammie Dodgers and the Adventure of the Leicester Square Screening"Shareable.net has just kicked off a new fiction series, "Visions of a Shareable Future," with stories about a future in which sharing is part of the norm. I have the inaugural story, "The Jammie Dodgers and the Adventure of the Leicester Square Screening," which I wrote as a kind of run-up to getting to work on my next YA novel, Pirate Cinema, which will likely be a 2011 Tor Teens title. Both "Jammie Dodgers" and Pirate Cinema are the story of streetkids in London who remix movies and screen them in impromptu theaters -- the sides of derelict pubs, ancient graveyards, vaulted Victorian sewers -- and establish an alternative to the mainstream Hollywood industry.Shareable: The Jammie Dodgers and the Adventure of the Leicester Square Screening
(Image: Tilt and shift - Leicester Square at night, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from rthakrar's photostream)
Google Chrome for Mac and Linux - Techtree.com
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 26 May 2010 | 3:54 am BBC launches new iPlayer with links to rival sites (Reuters)Reuters - British state broadcaster the BBC launched a new version of its popular iPlayer online catch-up video service with prominent links to rivals' websites, a move that may dampen criticism of its power in the market.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 26 May 2010 | 3:43 am BBC launches new iPlayer with links to rival sitesLONDON (Reuters) - British state broadcaster the BBC launched a new version of its popular iPlayer online catch-up video service with prominent links to rivals' websites, a move that may...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 26 May 2010 | 3:43 am Why the absence of copyright is good for fashionHere's Johanna Blakley from USC's Ready to Share project describing how the lack of copyright restrictions on fashion has improved the field -- everybody has to constantly invent, everybody can use anything from the fashion world as the basis for invention, and the result is a never-ending (and highly profitable) cycle of innovation. Johanna Blakely: Lessons from fashion's free culture (via /.)  Source: Boing Boing | 26 May 2010 | 3:35 am Why the absence of copyright is good for fashionHere's Johanna Blakley from USC's Ready to Share project describing how the lack of copyright restrictions on fashion has improved the field -- everybody has to constantly invent, everybody can use anything...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 May 2010 | 3:35 am Budget DSLR Shoulder-Mount Has More Holes than Swiss Cheese
Habbycam’s new SD Camera Brace is one of many shoulder mounts that make shooting video with a DSLR easier and steadier. The difference is that, at $250, this one has a price much more suited to the budget market that is likely to be shooting video with an SLR. The brace will work with any camera that has a tripod socket, so you’re not limited to stills cameras. It can be broken down into its component parts for storage and transport, and the 3-pound aluminum and stainless steel rig can support gear up to 20-pounds in weight. Sure, it’s good looking and functional, and probably even comfortable with that foam shoulder-pad, but there’s one added feature that makes the SD brace stand out. See those holes drilled in the shoulder bracket? They’re threaded as standard quarter-inch tripod mounts, which means you can attach all manner of accessories like sound-recorders or batteries. The Habbycam might not have the flat-out awesomeness of Jonathan Bergqvist’s amazing dad-crafted wooden mount, but then, you don’t have to ask your father to make one. Available now. SD Brace [Habbycam. Thanks, Jeff!] 
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 26 May 2010 | 3:34 am Pro-masturbation article from 1959 Here's a surprisingly progressive pro-masturbation article written by a minister for Sexology magazine in 1959: Still another kind of experience is illustrated in the case of Harley Smith. Harley was initiated into the practice at an early age among a gang of boys. Curiosity then led him to experiment himself.A Minister Discusses SELF-GRATIFICATION (Jan, 1959) Source: Boing Boing | 26 May 2010 | 3:30 am Pro-masturbation article from 1959Here's a surprisingly progressive pro-masturbation article written by a minister for Sexology magazine in 1959: Still another kind of experience is illustrated in the case of Harley Smith. Harley was...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 May 2010 | 3:30 am Mad World + Death Metal Scream = Eleanor RigbyPeaceLove sez, "My friend Sean travels from a Gary Julesesque "Mad World" to a death metal roar "Imagine" to "Eleanor Rigby." I had always known he was talented but this one blew me away; his control...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 May 2010 | 3:24 am Mad World + Death Metal Scream = Eleanor RigbyPeaceLove sez, "My friend Sean travels from a Gary Julesesque "Mad World" to a death metal roar "Imagine" to "Eleanor Rigby." I had always known he was talented but this one blew me away; his control throughout is astonishing and he's a pretty damn strong keyboardist as well." Mad World Imagine Eleanor Rigby Numb (Thanks, PeaceLove!)
Source: Boing Boing | 26 May 2010 | 3:24 am Greenpeace praises Nokia, slams Nintendo (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 26 May 2010 | 3:21 am Microsoft's mobile shakeup: Will it unleash Windows Phone? - BusinessWeek
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 26 May 2010 | 3:08 am Google Pac-Man trashes US economy - TG Daily
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 26 May 2010 | 2:30 am Cat-Adapted TV Shows - 'Lost' Reenacted by Cats is a Hilarious Summary to a Complicated Show (VIDEO)(TrendHunter.com) Explaining the plot of the TV show 'Lost' is difficult, but it is made easy in this video, 'Lost Reenacted by Cats.' This hilarious video features cats as the characters of the show,...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 May 2010 | 2:26 am The Fashion Industry As a Model For IP ReformScrameustache writes "In this 15-minute TED talk, Johanna Blakley addresses a subject alien to most here — fashion — but in a way sure to grab our attention. The lesson is about how the fashion industry's lack of copyright protection can teach other industries about what copyright means to innovation. And yes, she mentions open source software. There is one killer slide at 12:20 comparing the gross sales of low-IP-protection industries with those of films and books and music. If you want to know more, or if you prefer text, the Ready To Share project website should give you all the data you crave on the subject."
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Source: Slashdot | 26 May 2010 | 2:12 am Sound-Proof Flights - Lufthansa Airbus A380 Jetliner is Extra Extravagant (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) First class air travel is hands down the best way to fly. Lufthansa, Germany's largest airline, has upped the luxury level of first class with its Airbus A380 jetliner, claiming it...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 May 2010 | 2:11 am T-Mobile USA says CEO to leave in May 2011 (Reuters)Reuters - T-Mobile USA, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG (DTEGn.DE), said its chief executive, Robert Dotson, will leave the company in May 2011 and named Philipp Humm as its designated successor.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 26 May 2010 | 2:03 am T-Mobile USA says CEO to leave in May 2011(Reuters) - T-Mobile USA, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG , said its chief executive, Robert Dotson, will leave the company in May 2011 and named Philipp Humm as its designated successor.Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 26 May 2010 | 2:03 am Informative Fish Cartoons - The Witty Tale of 'How the Male Angler Fish Gets Completely Screwed' (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) The Oatmeal tells the sad story of the male angler fish in 'How the Male Angler Fish Gets Completely Screwed.' Literally, the poor guy is screwed. You can learn something new from...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 May 2010 | 1:56 am Libraries of Flesh: The Sorry State of Human Tissue Storage [Voices]By Steve Silberman, Contributor, Wired Magazine Of all the forms of woe that take root in the human genome, the cancer called Glioblastoma multiforme is one of the most merciless. It can infiltrate the brain’s white matter for months before causing any symptoms. By the time memory loss and seizures reveal the presence of an invader, there’s often little to do but minimize the patient’s suffering. Most who are diagnosed with the disease—people like the late senator Edward Kennedy—are dead within two years. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 26 May 2010 | 1:51 am Pakistan's Facebook ban drives minister to TwitterISLAMABAD (Reuters) - After Pakistan banned Facebook in a bid to stop it hosting "blasphemous" pictures of Prophet Mohammad, the country's interior minister found a new way to get his...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 26 May 2010 | 1:46 am Mark Zuckerberg, Movie Villain [Voices]By Choire Sicha, Choire Sicha, Contributor, Daily Beast Pretty much everyone resents or despises Mark Zuckerberg right now—even while most of them continue to be voluntary customers of his creation, Facebook. That makes it a really odd time for a big old Hollywood movie all about him to be coming down the pike. Unless, perhaps, the movie portrays him to be an awful schmuck? Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 26 May 2010 | 1:45 am Macondo, Top Kills, and When Things Lacked NamesWith the risky "top kill" of the leaking Macondo well still apparently targeted for Wednesday morning a process that may take 1-2 days, even if successful, which itself is a 50/50 thing I thought it...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 May 2010 | 1:45 am Secret Motorola Droid Shadow Found in Gym - PC World
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 26 May 2010 | 1:41 am ChumBuddy Is A Giant Man-Eating PlushBy Chris Scott Barr Stuffed animals are for little children, right? Wrong. This awesome ChumBuddy is awesome, regardless of your age. After all, who wouldn’t want a 7-foot stuffed shark? Okay, so...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 May 2010 | 1:30 am Q&A: Microsoft's Bach on His Exit, and Future of the Company [Voices]By Todd Bishop, Writer, Tech Flash Robbie Bach may have been viewed at one point as a potential successor to Steve Ballmer as Microsoft’s (MSFT) chief executive — but Bach says he never aspired to the job, and he and Ballmer have never discussed it. That was one of the insights we gleaned from the Microsoft Entertainment & Devices Division president during a wide-ranging interview in conjunction with the news that he’ll be retiring after 22 years with the company. Among other topics, Bach explained why he’s leaving, discussed his post-Microsoft plans, defended the company’s prospects in the mobile phone industry, addressed the canceled Courier project, and described the upcoming Project Natal release as a “midlife kicker” for the Xbox 360 console business. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 26 May 2010 | 1:30 am The Privacy Machiavellis [Voices]By Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Guest Contributor, SF Gate Imagine being followed in a shopping mall by a marketer who watches what you browse and buy and then recommends products. You might find this useful at times, but some consumers might never want to be followed. Ubiquitous consumer tracking is the reality in the online world. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 26 May 2010 | 1:23 am Coastline Computers - The Billabong Sony VAIO W Brings Online Browsing to the Beach (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) The Billabong Sony VAIO features a beach-inspired lid with dripping paint in lime green, sea blue and black. The first collaboration between Sony and surf company Billabong comes from...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 May 2010 | 1:21 am Ballmer: Robbie Bach Just Wanted to Retire (PC World)PC World - The management shakeup at Microsoft's entertainment and devices division doesn't reflect dissatisfaction with the company's mobile and game console strategies, company CEO Steve Ballmer said Wednesday.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 26 May 2010 | 1:20 am Here's What Analysts Should Be Asking About at Yahoo's Investor Day: The Microsoft Search Deal (and No Silver Bullets) [BoomTown]
This morning, Yahoo is holding its annual investor day at its Silicon Valley HQ, starring CEO Carol Bartz and a panoply of top execs at the Internet giant. While these kind of dog-and-pony shows are typical for companies–an effort to get all chummy with institutional investors and financial analysts and convince them that there is a grand scheme for the road ahead–what’s really at stake is a need to cover over the problems and play up the prettier parts. And that’s why–after a period of rather fallow deal activity– Yahoo (YHOO) suddenly started pulling out the shiny objects just last week, designed, in part, to show Yahoo on the move and pushing vigorously forward. We have a plan, folks! Silver bullets all around! That included its acquisitions of both social media start-up Associated Content and Koprol, a social location service in Asia, as well as a big, noisy partnership with mobile handset giant Nokia (NOK) related to email and maps. But, while each of those are all well and good, they will have almost zero impact on Yahoo until they get revved up and results can be judged. Thus, it’s probably more helpful for those in analog attendance–press are not invited as we are apparently considered akin to skunks at a garden party–to focus on some key issues that are present and accounted for right now and grill Yahoo about them. To be fair, Yahoo is planning on covering the most important of these at the moment–the status of its partnership deal with Microsoft (MSFT), related to search and online advertising. It will be interesting to see what advertising operations exec Mark Morrissey–who is the Yahoo-side integration lead–has to say about it all and what impact the company expects from it. Some key questions that need asking: How soon does it roll out–late this year or early next year? How does Yahoo get search share up–via improvements to its home page and user experience–to make this as lucrative as possible? Will the deal, which is intended to result in bigger search query volume, finally bring a key metric–revenue per search (RPS)–up, especially after the Microsoft RPS guarantees run out in 18 months? Are the cost savings of letting Microsoft’s Bing power Yahoo search enough for trading away control of a key source of income and revenue? And, perhaps most of all, will any of this put a dent in the overwhelming search dominance of Google (GOOG)? Here’s a really good analysis by Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney on this very subject with lots of nice numbers to chew over: Of course, there are a lot of other thing to look at, such as: The continuing issue around talent drain (Yahoo smart to trot out lively new Chief Products dude Blake Irving, formerly of Microsoft, to counter the drip-leak of execs issue); an explanation of its penny-ante (but pricey) marketing efforts so far; a report on what’s most innovative in its oft-clogged product pipeline; a detailed assessment of the online display market and thoughts on increased competition in this key Yahoo arena from Google; also what up? with mobile. You can see the whole agenda for the day here, and BoomTown will be following the proceedings via a Webcast. Also, as Yahoo notes on its Welcome page for the event: “Everything you’ll hear today–from looking back at what we’ve done to looking ahead at the incredible opportunities we’re tackling–add up to one thing: creating shareholder value.” So analysts, let’s don’t forget about the stock price, which has stubbornly stuck in the $15 range for a long time now. In fact, it is now almost the exact same price as it was one year ago and 75 cents lower than at its last investor day in late October last year. Yes, definitely ask about that. Source: All Things Digital | 26 May 2010 | 1:17 am Keyboard shortcutsReminder! You can now jump between posts on the front door of Boing Boing by hitting J and K. It should work on most browsers. Any similar UI requests? Under consideration: L to go to the next 30 posts; and the Konami Code to trigger a unicorn invasion.Source: Boing Boing | 26 May 2010 | 1:10 am Keyboard shortcutsReminder! You can now jump between posts on the front door of Boing Boing by hitting J and K. It should work on most browsers. Any similar UI requests? Under consideration: L to go to the next 30 posts;...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 May 2010 | 1:10 am Congress: It's Time to Rewrite the Telecommunications Bible [Voices]By Matthew Lasar, Contributor, Ars Technica To telecom industry lawyers, it is the Five Books of Moses, The New Testament, The Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Ultimate API for Everything. We’re talking about the Communications Act, and Capitol Hill leaders say it’s time to “develop proposals” to update the law. “As the first step, they will invite stakeholders to participate in a series of bipartisan, issue-focused meetings beginning in June,” the announcement notes. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 26 May 2010 | 1:09 am The Incredible Slipping Delivery Date [Voices]By Niraj Sheth, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal Verizon Wireless’ (VZ) newest flagship phone, HTC’s Droid Incredible, is living up to the name: It’s incredibly hard to find in stores. Impossible, actually. The phone sold out soon after hitting shelves on April 29 and has been on back-order for over a week. Even more frustrating for Droid fanatics, the date for when it will ship has been a moving target, getting pushed further and further back as orders pile up. Customers can order a Droid today and have it by June 15 — if it was ordered a week ago, the ship date was June 8. Either way, few people ordering their Incredibles will get them before Steve Jobs takes the stage on June 7 at Apple’s (AAPL) Worldwide Developers Conference, where he is widely expected to pull the cloth off of the new iPhone. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 26 May 2010 | 1:00 am Wired's first iPad issue comes out; costs $5 (AP)AP - As the magazine for a digital generation, Wired has talked a big game about the opportunities for publishers on Apple's new iPad.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 26 May 2010 | 1:00 am Wired's first iPad issue comes out; costs $5As the magazine for a digital generation, Wired has talked a big game about the opportunities for publishers on Apple's new iPad. "We decided this was the big one," Wired editor Chris...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 26 May 2010 | 1:00 am Work Underway To Return Xen Support To Fedora 13Julie188 writes "So details on this are admittedly sketchy, but both Red Hat and Xen.org have gone on record promising that some kind of support for the Xen hypervisor is forthcoming for Fedora users. As we know, on Monday, Fedora 13 was released and it was chock full of features to appeal to business users. One of the ballyhooed improvements to 13 is virtualization — meaning KVM and only KVM — for Red Hat. Xen was dropped from Fedora a few releases ago and it hasn't come back in 13, except that 13 still supports Xen guests. Meanwhile, 'work is underway in Xen.org to add platform support to Fedora 13 post-release,' promises Xen.org's Ian Pratt."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 26 May 2010 | 12:10 am Wired Magazine's iPad Edition Goes Live The irony that Wired, a magazine founded to chronicle the digital revolution, has traditionally come to you each month on the smooshed atoms of dead trees is not lost on us. Let's just say the medium is not always the message.
Except that now it is. I'm delighted to announce that Wired's first digital edition is now available for the iPad and soon for nearly all other tablets. We have always made our stories accessible online at Wired.com, but as successful as the site is, it is not a magazine.
The tablet is our opportunity to make the Wired we always dreamed of. It has all the visual impact of paper, enhanced by interactive elements like video and animated infographics. We can offer you a history of Mars landings that lets you explore the red planet yourself. We can take you inside Trent Reznor's recording studio and let you listen to snippets of his work in progress. And we can show you exactly how Pixar crafted each frame of its new movie, Toy Story 3.
To deliver this rich reading environment, we're using new digital publishing technology developed by Adobe. The yearlong effort, spearheaded by Wired creative director Scott Dadich, will allow us to simultaneously create both the print magazine and the enhanced digital version with the same set of authoring and design tools.
The arrival of the tablet represents a grand experiment in the future of media. Over the next few months, we'll integrate social media and offer a variety of versions and ways to subscribe in digital form. We'll learn through experimentation, and we will watch closely as our readers teach us how they want to use tablets.
There is no finish line. Wired Magazine will be digital from now on, designed from the start as a compelling interactive experience, in parallel with our print edition. Wired is finally, well, wired.
Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief
[HTML1] FEATURES Innovative features of the Wired App include:
Source: Wired Top Stories | 26 May 2010 | 12:00 am Beautiful Supernova ViolenceApproximately 5,000 years ago, a massive star in the Large Magellanic Cloud destroyed itself, leaving us to gaze at a gorgeous remnant (plus shrapnel), helping us learn about the physics of a supernova.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 25 May 2010 | 11:22 pm Aluratek Libre review Aluratek's Libre reader gets it: it's cheap — $150 list, $100 at Sears — and fills the long-form reading niche that brightly-screened tablets like the iPad can't serve, but which no-one is going to spend a lot of money on anymore. There are compromises: it's slow to flip pages and is not a pretty thing at all. Furthermore, the display doesn't seem as nice as other readers, either. Sony's superior Pocket Reader is also only a little more expensive. But it is more expensive, so if you're just looking for something quasi-disposable to replace airport paperbacks, here you go. It even comes with a free SD card, loaded with out-of-copyright classics.
Amazon Link  Source: Boing Boing | 25 May 2010 | 11:11 pm A Taste of Startup Alley
A hundred startups lined-up the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt. Here’s just a small taste of some of the interesting companies that over 1,700 attendees were able to see: 6rounds6rounds, which we wrote about in a previous post can be best described as a snazzy one-on-one video chat product. At TechCrunch Disrupt, 6rounds announced a new API for developers of game, entertainment and collaboration-based apps. With the API, developers can easily integrate all the rich and interactive functionality of 6rounds, including gifting, video effects, and the ability to add multi-user functionality to single player games and videos.
AppFirst
With this type of visibility organizations can flag changes before they become problems and have a negative impact on internal users, or external customers. AppFirst is NYC-based with backing by FirstMark Capital and First Round Capital.
RankAboveSeven months after we wrote about its closed beta, RankAbove is pushing its automated SEO analysis product, Drive, into open beta. Drive is intended for sites with a minimum of 1000 pages, up to several million. It performs everything from keyword research and on-page analysis, to link building and acquisition. For the open beta, RankAbove made some product improvements such as new backlink analysis tool, daily updated competitive analysis, opportunities to find organic relevant backlinks and a new UI. If you’re at Disrupt, stop by their booth for a free site analysis.
sProphetsProphet (Sports Prophet) lets fans share sports knowledge by predicting outcomes of real sporting events. For example, they can predict which baseball batter will have the longest batting streak in the MLB this week. Users play with virtual money to challenge their friends and arrange group prediction tournaments. sProphet is offered through a destination site, via a Facebook application and soon through a widget which will be offered to partners such as sports sites and portals.
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Source: TechCrunch | 25 May 2010 | 11:08 pm Why Most Stars Have TwinsNew research suggests that asymmetries in the dust-laced clouds of gas that feed baby stars are responsible.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 25 May 2010 | 11:00 pm Facebook Privacy Woes Make Little Impact on Site's Popularity - BusinessWeek
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 25 May 2010 | 10:27 pm Ploom review
Ploom is a wee butane-powered vaporizer that has a cigarette-esque form factor and produces enough smoke to make it feel like a smoke. So far, so good. Unfortunately, it requires proprietary pods, none of which contain weed, and parts of it get hot on the outside. It's an amazing little sci-fi gadget -- a bit like a fancy mechanical pencil -- though not really something I want inside of me. The smoke I found curiously unsatisfying, too, but I smoke cigars. So your mileage may vary. And it's just $30.
Product PageSource: Boing Boing | 25 May 2010 | 10:23 pm Joule iPad stand review
Element Case's Joule is a premium iPad stand. A heavy, polished block of metal that looks like a work of art — or perhaps a discarded industrial component — it comes with a detachable metal bar that can be adjusted three ways for different viewing angles. As far as designer iPad stands go, it's hard to imagine something fancier that is not completely absurd. As it is, this one is expensive enough: $130 solves your exceedingly first-world problem. It's gorgeous, but there's a flaw! There's no way to snake the charging cord into it, so it can't do charging duty.
P.S. It strikes me is how this and, say, a $1 business card holder, each exemplify the two poles of 'minimalism.' Joule is the end that costs a lot, is beautiful, lasts forever, simplifies decisively, but carries a vague whiff of ubiquitous consumption in unnecessary places. The $1 business card holder seems more truthful in that it offers the bare minimum required to fulfill its function, but is actually a bit crap. All in all, it's easy to see why one would pay $30 for the one from Apple that actually charges the damned iPad.
Element Case JouleSource: Boing Boing | 25 May 2010 | 10:09 pm Data Center Building Boom In Silicon Valley1sockchuck writes "Data center developers are building like mad in Silicon Valley, with seven active projects in Santa Clara alone. The building boom includes the resumption of several stalled projects that prompted concerns of a shortage of wholesale data center space in the Valley. The flurry of construction activity is different than the overbuilding during the dot-com boom, which was characterized by too much funding and too few customers. This time, industry experts say, the end of a funding drought has created a situation in which construction is struggling to stay ahead of demand from companies like Facebook — which just scarfed up an entire new data center in Santa Clara."
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Source: Slashdot | 25 May 2010 | 10:08 pm Hillcrest Labs Releases New Version of Kylo(TM): the Web Browser for TVSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 25 May 2010 | 10:01 pm May 26, 1995: Gates, Microsoft Jump on 'Internet Tidal Wave'Bill Gates' memo pushes Microsoft full-tilt into the internet era.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 25 May 2010 | 10:00 pm Rob Glaser, Founder of RealNetworks, Joins Accel PartnersPALO ALTO, Calif., May 26 /PRNewswire/ -- Accel Partners, a leading global venture capital and growth equity firm operating in Silicon Valley, Europe, Israel, China and India, today announced that Rob Glaser has joined the firm as a Venture Partner.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 25 May 2010 | 10:00 pm RealNetworks Founder Glaser Becomes a VC at Accel–the Venture Firm that Backed Him 15 Years Ago [BoomTown]Rob Glaser, the founder of RealNetworks, is joining Accel Partners as a part-time venture partner. Ironically, it was Accel that first funded the digital media pioneer, leading a critical $5.7 million round for RealNetworks (RNWK) in 1995. Glaser said in an interview with BoomTown this afternoon that he will focus on digital media, as well as social and mobile start-ups, especially in the Seattle and Pacific Northwest area where he lives and also founded RealNetworks.
As for being a VC after years of being an entrepreneur, Glaser (pictured here) said that he was looking forward to being on the other side, especially at Silicon Valley-based Accel. “I have never seen a more entrepreneurially aligned venture firm,” he said. “And it is a really exciting time to be investing a a firm with that kind of high density intelligence.” The rest of Glaser’s time will be devoted to his board duties, as well as other political and charitable pursuits, including focusing on new baby: 10-day-old son, Max. Glaser stepped down as longtime CEO of RealNetworks earlier this year, but has remained its chairman and owns more than one-third of its shares. Although the company has struggled in recent year, RealNetworks has been a genuine and innovative pioneer in Web audio and video software and an early player in Web music services, although not everyone was a fan of the technology because of its aggressive deployment. The company was originally called Progressive Networks after Glaser’s political bent. There have been several well-known entrepreneurs who have turned into VCs–most recently, Netscape Communications Founder Marc Andreessen, who started a firm. Here’s the official press release:
Source: All Things Digital | 25 May 2010 | 9:50 pm Termites: Architects of the African SavannaA specialized pattern of termites mounds form the foundation of one of the most famous ecosystems on the planet.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 25 May 2010 | 9:42 pm Motorola's New IPTV Set-top Brings Innovative Media Experiences to KDDI's CustomersSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 25 May 2010 | 9:00 pm Feds looking into Apple's tactics for music: report (Reuters)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 May 2010 | 8:46 pm Congressmen Send Letters, Hope For Net Neutrality FadesThe odds of the FCC implementing net-neutrality rules just got much longer. "A bipartisan group of politicians on Monday told FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in no uncertain terms, to abandon his plans to impose controversial new rules on broadband providers until the US Congress changes the law. Seventy-four House Democrats sent Genachowski... a letter saying his ideas will 'jeopardize jobs' and 'should not be done without additional direction from Congress.' A separate letter from 37 Senate Republicans, also sent Monday, was more pointed. It accused Genachowski of pushing 'heavy-handed 19th century regulations' that are 'inconceivable' as well as illegal. ...unless something unexpected happens, the fight over Net neutrality will shift a few blocks down Independence Avenue from the FCC to Capitol Hill. (In an editorial Monday, The Washington Post called for just that.)"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 25 May 2010 | 8:28 pm BAE looks to draw government cyber work (Reuters)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 May 2010 | 8:04 pm Appletell reviews the Duo-i Plus from Boston AcousticsFROM APPLETELL - Everything about the Duo i-plus is serious. This is not just another wimpy iPod/iPhone speaker dock—the Duo i-plus is an audio standout among a sea of lesser competitors. Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 25 May 2010 | 8:00 pm UPDATE 3-BP-owned Alaska oil pipeline shut after spill* Producers cutting output to 16 pct of normal (Adds background on importance of pipeline)Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 25 May 2010 | 7:48 pm UPDATE 2-Crystal storms back, Lee nervous in "Idol" finaleLOS ANGELES, May 25 (Reuters) - Crystal Bowersox stormed back against a nervous Lee DeWyze in the "American Idol" performance finale on Tuesday, stealing the hearts of the judges and setting up a nail-biting...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 25 May 2010 | 7:46 pm Depth of Brazil subsalt oil raises leak risks:prof* Oil safety equipment more likely to fail in deeper waterSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 25 May 2010 | 7:23 pm UPDATE 1-Nippon Oil plans June crude refining up 2 pct* Overall June processing plan for about 860,000 bpd -reportSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 25 May 2010 | 7:20 pm Video: Butterfly Effect on Sun's SurfaceHigh-resolution images of layers of the sun's surface show how small flares can trigger larger flares and coronal mass ejections hundreds of thousands of miles away.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 25 May 2010 | 7:15 pm Wisair to Unveil the WSR602 NEW Wireless USB Single Chip in Computex TaipeiCAMPBELL, Calif., May 25 /PRNewswire/ -- Wisair, the leading provider of single-chip based UWB and Wireless USB solutions, will unveil its NEW WSR602 CMOS single chip in Computex, the largest computer exhibition in Asia (June 1st-5th). The new chip offers PCI Express/WHCI interface and additional frequency bands, including WiMedia BG1 and BG3, BG4 & BG6 upper bands (3.1GHz to 9.5GHz).Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 25 May 2010 | 7:10 pm Survival Of The Fittest: The Startups That Made The Second Round At #TCDisrupt
We were fortunate enough to witness a lot of fascinating startups strut their stuff here at TechCrunch Disrupt, not just on the main stage but also in the Startup Alley and beyond. But of course the event is and remains a competition, so the experts have been working hard to select those startups with the most potential to be genuinely disruptive, and vote them into the second round of the pitching contest. Just ten of the original twenty startups have been invited back to round two. The final few startups will be announced tomorrow, and they’ll be back on stage for the final round of demo and rapid-fire Q&A with our experts. Appbistro
Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video. Information provided by CrunchBase Betterment
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Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video. Information provided by CrunchBase LiveIntent
For advertisers, it’s an enabling technology that builds stronger and longer lasting relationships between brands and consumers in social media. Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video. Information provided by CrunchBase MOVIECLIPS
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Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video. Information provided by CrunchBase UJAM
Here’s our review (there are links to other coverage from around the Web in there). Information provided by CrunchBase WeReward
Here’s our review + video.      
Source: TechCrunch | 25 May 2010 | 7:03 pm Is Android advancing too fast?Section: Communications, Email / IM, Smartphones, Mobile
Here’s a funny twist: Andy Rubin, head Android engineer resists the idea that fragmentation will harm Google’s Android. Fragmentation is having a lot of different versions of an operating system in use along with a slew of apps that don’t work with all versions of the OS. The result is some phones have and others have nots. The problems of fragmentation are exacerbated with an aggressive update schedule, like the one Google is pursuing. Add in makers, like HTC, who have a custom GUI built on top that prevents them from keeping pace with Google’s Android updates and you’ve got a mish-mosh of apps and services that might work on a given phone. The result is confusion for users. Or is it? From the Gizmodo interview,
Comparing Windows to Android by the head engineer is more than cavalier, it’s foolish. The years it takes Windows to push out a new version is in no way a comparison the months Google Android operates on. No sooner have we figured out Android’s latest flavor, than another one pops up on the horizon. Don’t get me wrong, Android’s made huge advancements in overall quality but the open architecture means that by design, they are pushing forward alone. Others may not follow. Apple has managed to duck this issue for the most part so far. They’ve even manged to stretch it to the iPad, the same app brought to new places instead of restricting where an app can go. Rubin does seem to acknowledge they are jumping too fast:
That sounds like a smarter move. Read: [Gizmodo] via [JKontherun] Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 25 May 2010 | 6:59 pm Taking T-Mobile's speedy HSPA+ network for a test drive (Ben Patterson)Ben Patterson - No, you probably won't get bone-rattling cable-modem speeds from T-Mobile's upgraded HSPA+ data network, but I was still impressed by its consistently peppy download and even upload speeds, and the bargain-priced monthly data plans are hard to beat. That said, you might have to wait a while before T-Mobile HSPA+ coverage comes to your city.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 May 2010 | 6:45 pm Where Were You When PLATO Was Born?PLATO, cradle of so many firsts, was born 50 years ago. Next week the Computer History Museum is hosting a 2-day conference to celebrate the anniversary. Microsoft's Ray Ozzie, who worked on PLATO as an undergraduate, will be one of the keynote speakers. Co-producer Brian Dear has put together a list of today's technology notables and what they were doing in 1973, the year that social computing suddenly blossomed on PLATO.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 25 May 2010 | 6:40 pm How BP's Top Kill Will Work (We Hope)BP's top kill procedure uses toxic drilling mud and has just a 60 to 70 percent chance of working.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 25 May 2010 | 6:38 pm Franklin Wireless Teams With Samsung Electro-Mechanics Co., Ltd as Key Manufacturer of New Broadband ModulesSAN DIEGO, May 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Franklin Wireless Corp.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 25 May 2010 | 6:29 pm AT&T launches free WiFi hotspot in Times SquareSection: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile
AT&T customers with smartphones, 3G LaptopConnect and AT&T High Speed Internet plans will be able to take advantage of the WiFi for free. Many of these devices come with auto-authentication for WiFi hot spots; therefore, whenever you come in range of the WiFi network in Times Square, your device might automatically connect to the network providing faster speeds. For those who cross Times Square en route to work or for recreation, I’m sure you will enjoy access to broadband speeds courtesy of AT&T. Since it is a pilot program, it may be implemented in other congested areas assuming it is successful in Times Square. Read [AT&T] Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 25 May 2010 | 6:22 pm Storyboard: Lost, Musical Notes From the IslandThe Storyboard podcast takes a look at the most important part of Lost that you never see -- the music.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 25 May 2010 | 6:10 pm Psst: Dell's Streak Isn't an Android Tablet - PC World
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 25 May 2010 | 6:06 pm Inside Foursquare: Checking In Before the Party Started (Part II)
In Part I of our insider look at the earliest days of Foursquare, we saw everything go downhill in a flurry of technical catastrophes. But we also caught a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel. In this second and concluding installment we join the founders at South By SouthWest -- the debutante ball of the internet startup world -- utter the "G" word and consider the iPhone conundrum.
'I’m waiting for the first original thing they come out with,' Crowley says of Gowalla.
The rapidly growing number of workstations at Foursquare's office look like scene from the Matrix: split keyboards, obscure wires and a disconcerting old cup of something that might be soup. No trench coats, though.
Code is compiling on co-founder Naveen Selvadurai’s screen. Green text scrolls on a black background on programmer Harry Heymann’s. A blue-eyed new hire, Tim Vetter, currently homeless and sporting purple corduroy pants, leans back in his chair.
The mood is at once casual and intense. Jokes and laughter intermittently penetrate the haze of concentration, bouts of frustration occasionally interrupting 90-wpm typing. Co-founder Dennis Crowley is obviously stressed. Upon entering the office, he’s instantly bogged down in communication: Twitter, e-mail, AOL Instant Messenger, and texts on his iPhone.
“Oh man, oh man,” he repeats about every 30 seconds. Turns out he’s running on two days without sleep. Thirty-six hours ago he was in Amsterdam presenting Foursquare at a conference. Fresh off the plane, he spoke at NYU last night and then at Web 2.0 Expo this morning, a talk he claims was “not stellar.” He’s got his fingers crossed that his 1 p.m. meeting bails on him. “I just want lunch,” he mutters.
Heymann rants to no one in particular. Because of the crowdsourced nature of the data on Foursquare (users can add new venues or change name-and-address information), listings are in a constant state of disarray.
They’re also battling with ways to curb cheating, an inevitable byproduct of the game. People checking in remotely in order to steal mayorships, racking up points without earning them are at the top of the list.
On the marketing side, they’re working hard to alleviate consumer-privacy fears. It’s common to hear someone say, “I don’t want everyone to be able to see my exact location. That’s freaky!”
Although Foursquare only reveals your location when you specifically tell it to -– and then only to a select group you choose -– earlier GPS apps were literally always on, like tracking devices from a spy movie. People have a hard time shaking that idea when they’re introduced to Foursquare.
At least they can sign up now, though.
However, a bigger concern has cropped up in the last month: a competitor based in Austin, Texas, named Gowalla.
“You just said the ‘G’ word!” Crowley spits when I bring it up.
Selvadurai delivers the punishment, “Time-out corner!”
Gowalla also launched at SXSW 2009. It sought to become a virtual passport for your life, but began as mainly a GPS-based game. While initially buggy, it saw opportunity in the same city guide–social network–game space Foursquare had nestled into. The Gowalla team managed to raise $8.4 million to seize that opportunity, and some of its investors included angels that had talked with Foursquare and were now kicking themselves for not sealing a deal.
With seven times the cash and the backing of web media barons like Digg’s Rose and Wine Library TV’s Gary Vaynerchuck, in a few short months Gowalla had become a serious contender for Foursquare’s throne. Although Gowalla’s user base was smaller in comparison, it was already available in cities Foursquare wasn’t, and some bloggers were predicting it would topple Crowley’s creation.
The tension is thick. “I’m waiting for the first original thing they come out with,” Crowley says. “Everything they’ve come out with so far is a derivative of ours. It’s bullshit.” He demonstrates screenshots he’s taken of Gowalla allegedly ripping off Foursquare features. Gowalla had just created its own version of mayorship: the top 10 users in each venue.
It also came out with Explorer and Discoverer badges –- exact replicas of Foursquare’s. Even the app’s liner notes, “Lovingly created by Dennis, Naveen, and Harry,” are similar on Gowalla’s site: “Lovingly made by the guys and girls going places in Austin, Texas.”
Gowalla CEO Josh Williams, a friendly, long-haired serial entrepreneur and web 2.0 veteran himself, says in an e-mail that he’s not threatened by Foursquare. On the contrary, he says, “I felt like the presence of other innovative location services was simply confirmation that we might be onto something interesting.” He and co-founder Scott Raymond built their private version of what would become Gowalla five months before Foursquare launched.
He continues, “I believe Gowalla will be the leader in this space because of our commitment to design,” among other things. His app sparkles with illustrations, cartoon characters, and a friendly interface. Many bloggers have since agreed with Williams that Gowalla’s “cooler” design will help it outshine Foursquare. Vaynerchuck, who is a personal friend of Crowley’s, recently said at New York University’s 0260 Conference that Gowalla is a better product, though he believes Foursquare will win due to its head start and good PR.
Further complicating matters, semi-competitors like the popular GPS friend finder, Loopt, could easily modify their software infrastructure to compete on the same city-guide and social-game level. “I think both Foursquare and Gowalla are great apps –- using the real world as the backdrop for a game is a lot of fun,” Loopt CEO Sam Altman says. “It’s probably a safe assumption that we’ll add some gaming elements.”
Or worse, Facebook’s recent announcement of adding location check-ins could be a hydrogen bomb that ends the war overnight.
Fred Wilson, of Foursquare investor Union Square Ventures, calls Gowalla “a knockoff.” But, he says, “if Foursquare keeps doing what they’re doing and making the product better and better, they’ll be able to beat the competition.”
The Foursquare team has a head start, but the Scala rewrite has drawn their attention away from building new features, allowing Gowalla and others to close much of the gap in the meantime.
Location-based social networks have to catch on among some non-geeks to start a chain reaction. Easy to say, hard to do.
Anyone who thinks computer geeks can’t date hot girls ought to meet Harry Heymann’s girlfriend.
Alice Marwick is beautiful and confident, with dark hair and a pretty smile. She sits in her NYU office near Washington Square Park.
The fact that she’s finishing a Ph.D. in the study of Social Technology not only adds allure, but also makes her uniquely qualified to weigh in on Foursquare. Having played with computers since she was a kid in the '80s and worked for companies like Microsoft while still in her teens, Marwick goes by the screen name AliceTiara (a tribute to her brief study of feminist theory).
“I think that Foursquare has utility for just about anyone who is social,” she says. But its hurdle is getting people past the mindset of, "Is this kind of a geeky thing to do?” And that just takes time, she explains. “Every technology when it starts is kind of this geeky outlier. Even a few years ago, why would you want to have e-mail on your phone?”
Marwick is a big Foursquare proponent -– not because she’s dating one of the founders (in fact, she’s hesitant to even talk about Heymann in context of his work), but because she’s studied the rise and fall of online social networks from an academic perspective since they began. Foursquare has a formula she thinks will win. The adoption of social technologies is a network effect, she explains. “The more people on the service, the more utility it has for you.”
Historically, once social technologies are introduced into a network, they tend to spread quickly among a group of friends, Marwick points out.
Facebook was a prime example of this. Initially, many respond to new social tech with, “Why would I even want to do that?” But sooner or later, people within social groups realize they’re missing out by not using the technology. By this same theory, location-based social networks like Foursquare just have to catch on among some non-geeks to start a chain reaction.
Easy to say, hard to do.
If anyone in this burgeoning new arena can do it, Crowley is the one who will, says Albert Wenger, another partner at Foursquare investor Union Square Ventures. Even though Crowley's previous venture, Dodgeball, failed, Wenger says it is precisely why Foursquare will succeed. “He’s been active at the intersection of mobile and social behavior and getting incentives and product to work before,” Wenger explains. “It’s given him really good instincts about what works and what doesnt work in this world.”
Consider the Gym Rat badge, which users earn by checking into a fitness center 10 times in a month. Many Foursquare users say they’ve started exercising in order to earn the badge, and the habit’s stuck. Marwick’s one of them. “I really think Dennis is a visionary,” she grins. “He really has this big picture idea of how people can use social technology to improve their lives, which I think is missing in most products.”
Whereas the kind words are certain to make Crowley blush, even knowing or doing all the “right” things doesn’t guarantee success. Much of Foursquare’s future, Wenger points out, depends on things outside its control.
"That’s why an iPhone commercial would be nice." Nathan Folkman says this as he sips his coffee. We sit at a worn wooden table inside Think Coffee on Bleecker Street, a few blocks from the office.
If the Foursquare guys were in a sitcom, Think Coffee would be one of the main sets. This is the place where Crowley and Selvadurai sat one year ago, sketching out how Foursquare would work. It’s a “fair trade” joint, generally packed with NYU students in corduroys and Converse All-Stars. Pale fluorescent lights cast a yellow tint on the brick walls and chalkboard menus.
While we talk, people in beanies and coats keep coming in from the cold (it’s early December now), looking disappointed that there are no seats. Madonna sings in the background, but the track changes to something by a female-fronted punk band.
Folkman, 34, is a graphic designer turned programmer with a ready smile and scronky eyebrows. He showed up 30 minutes early, because he saw me check in at the cafe after I misjudged the transit time. Foursquare has just saved me a half hour of my life.
“Apple’s like a kingmaker,” Folkman says, brows rising as he speaks. Many an iPhone app has been catapulted to the top of its genre after being serendipitously displayed on one of Apple’s TV spots. Folkman believes Fousquare’s success over Gowalla and others could come down to whichever one Apple tosses onto a commercial, and the idea of being subject to someone else’s whim makes him uncomfortable.
A few days earlier, Selvadurai was venting a similar frustration from two tables over. “With Apple, it’s like we do all this testing, and then it goes in this black box. And we just have to wait.” He’s talking about the process of getting Foursquare updates into Apple’s iTunes store. Even though Foursquare is free, to use it on the iPhone one must download it through Apple. This is part of quality control –- making sure nothing nasty makes it onto Apple phones –- but for a company like Foursquare whose whole business rides on smartphone apps, it bottlenecks the entire development process.
A three-minute bug update can take three weeks to get to the App Store. “That’s stupid. It’s not a disaster, but it’s asking to be a disaster at some point,” Selvadurai says. And whereas Foursquare has apps for various other phones by now, iPhone users are by far its largest market.
Selvadurai is 27, the youngest in the crew. Born in Southeast India and raised in Connecticut, he looks strikingly like the photo of Michael Jackson on GQ’s recent cover, “When Michael was cool.” Hair and all.
Having graduated with bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and then working at a mobile-programming division of Sony, he says he’s never been as busy in his life as he is now. Selvadurai works nonstop –- frequently until 2 or 3 a.m. –- and when he’s at home or hanging out at bars with the other guys, he’s still working, tweaking things from his laptop, testing bug fixes on his phone.
Yesterday, also at Think Coffee, Heymann confessed the same thing, “I work 6 or 7 days, but I’m always thinking about it.” Heymann doesn’t like coffee, and he laughs as he tells me he usually gets hot cocoa and doesn’t feel cool at meetings like this. An indie-rock enthusiast from Seattle, he sports jeans, a leather jacket, and a purple “I turn beer into software” T-shirt. He laughs a lot and articulates well.
“I used to go out like six nights a week when I worked at Google,” he says. But working at a startup like Foursquare prevents that from happening anymore. “It’s like a family when you have a company this small,” he notes. “It’s all great, and you love each other and work hard, but it’s also a little dysfunctional. The added pressure of trying to develop something really fast makes it crazier.”
Each member instinctively seems to defer to Crowley. Between his leadership role and a natural propensity to be right, Crowley makes decisions that could take a board of directors days as handily as picking where to eat. (In fact, I was there when he decided both the new categorization method for Foursquare’s growing number of cities and the cafe they team would lunch at that day in the same sentence). He’s not whimsical; he just makes it look easy.
“He’s a natural at it,” Folkman explains. “He knows the things that aren’t gonna work. Doesn’t matter if they’re kinda buzzworthy or not. He can cut through that shit.”
Despite a packed schedule, Crowley manages to be a social luminary among New York City techsters (the subcultural offspring of San Francisco geeks and Brooklyn hipsters). His Foursquare check-ins pinpoint him at multiple late-night parties a month and popular bars like Scratcher and Tom & Jerry’s on a weekly basis.
He posts hilarious Flickr pictures and tells his friends (on Foursquare) when he’s sneaking foot-long sandwiches into the movie theater. He even “live-tweets” Christmas mass every year. (“Just saw a kid take holy communion with a Nintendo DS in his hand!”).
Foursquare has literally changed Crowley and his friends’ social lives. “I don’t make plans anymore,” he says. “You just see where everyone is and go there. And then you check in, and more people show up.”
Though he says the app can be useful within any group, Crowley almost embodies the gripe that Foursquare is just for the cool kids. The question still stands: How to take it mainstream?
Crowley argues that getting Foursquare in the hands of “real people” is really just about exposure. “It’s a great product. You just gotta teach the masses why,” he says.
If you use Twitter, you can probably relate to my own story. Upon being introduced to the idea of sharing 140-character status updates throughout the day, I was quick to say, “Why would I want to read about what someone else had for breakfast?” In time, however, I became slowly aware of Twitter’s enormous potential to enhance the way I communicate and even read the news. Now I use it all the time, probably more than I should.
Christopher Sullivan, a 30-year-old actor-musician in New York had a similar experience with Foursquare. He started using it at the request of his girlfriend, and for a while he said he just felt silly. As days went by, he suddenly began “ousting” mayors and earning badges, which he says made it immediately more fun and encouraged him to recruit some friends to try it. Now, he’s eager to talk anyone into giving Foursquare a shot.
“When selling the idea of Foursquare to my on-the-go friends who groan at yet another social networking tool to maintain, I make the case that this is more of an offline social tool that brings people together outside of the computer world and internet time-wasting,” Sullivan says. “It certainly helps those living in cities and night owls like me that tend to bounce around several times in one night.”
Sullivan’s been converted, but could the same happen to a teenage girl? A 50-year old man?
'You want like 18 different things, and you’re not prioritizing,' Heymann tells Crowley.
Foursquare has a weapon they're hoping can prevent a fadlike demise.
The team is meeting to discuss it, and the “conference room” is packed. It’s now December, and Mike Singleton, a friendly, clean-cut front-end developer, hasn’t settled into the office culture yet. His first day started about 30 minutes ago, and he’s dressed up nicer than any of the other guys. The only exception to this is Tristan Walker, but he’s new to the office, too. Walker’s been pursuing Foursquare retail partnerships from his apartment in California as a marketing intern since summer. He’s tall and handsome, sporting a V-neck sweater over a purple button-up shirt.
Selvadurai walks in and high-fives him, and once Crowley gets off the phone with the lawyer, the meeting starts.
“I’m really moving down the chair hierarchy here,” Crowley says as he sits on an old NYU dorm chair that makes him significantly shorter than the rest. Singleton has been sitting comfortably in a brand-new, black leather one, and a few minutes ago Crowley was narrowing his eyes at him, threatening, “You better enjoy that chair while you have it.”
The meeting is held in a corner of the main office that’s been sectioned off by two temporary, plastic walls. The “room” is brick on one side, cinderblock on another, with an oval table in the center. The group barely fits.
Selvadurai has just built what’s called an Application Programming Interface. It allows third parties to build their own software on top of Foursquare’s rich data source, providing venue addresses, user statistics, maps and reviews for anyone to use. This might hedge them against competitors like Gowalla and also, possibly, Rushkoff’s social network recession scenario.
If enough developers use its API, Foursquare could become “plumbing” that serves a host of location-based apps. Rather than being Minesweeper, Foursquare would be Windows, the underlying architecture upon which others depend. Facebook and Twitter, through their own APIs, have become universes unto themselves with games, utilities and entire businesses being built on them. With some luck, Foursquare could firmly establish itself as a pillar of the web, even if only within the city-guide space (which would be less affected by a downturn in social networking).
Meanwhile, Walker has been busy penning exclusive contracts with retailers. He updates the group on the progress of deals with Don Q, Pinkberry, and possibly the 2010 Winter Olympics. While finishing up his MBA at Stanford University, Walker spends virtually every spare moment on the phone talking Foursquare with potential partners. His pending deals with Mark Jacobs, Intel and Harvard could help entrench Foursquare into more and more mainstream channels, a big break for Crowley amidst the tide of naysayers.
The meeting concludes with Crowley’s own to-do list. Foursquare is now measuring global check-in activity in the millions, and that to-do list is becoming massive. There’s too much to keep track of.
Heymann points out, “You want like 18 different things, and you’re not prioritizing.”
Crowley takes the bravado a bit huffily, but after a moment he nods. Heymann’s right.
Regardless, Foursquare’s not going to build itself. The meeting lasts 16 minutes, 29 seconds, and they’re back to work.
---
Shane Snow is the founder of http://dino.sr.
Graphic courtesy Shane Snow. category:People,Social Media,
Source: Wired Top Stories | 25 May 2010 | 6:03 pm BP: "The solution will not be televised" / UPDATEDUpdate: BP's official Twitter account just posted word that yes, the spew-surveillance internet video feed will continue during Wednesday's attempt to stop the flow. Not this account, maintained by pranksters, but the legit one. Though it's not like the presence of a live video feed in and of itself will make things any better, stop the destruction, or clean up what's already devastated. And for the record, I don't agree with Markey's outrage over a web video "blackout." After all, if the attempted fix doesn't work, I wish these bastards all the luck in the world trying to hide that...
(YouTube link). BP today announced that it plans to disable the happy-fun live internet video feed of oil spewing at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico while BP engineers try to stop up the well using a procedure they call "top kill." Rep. Edward Markey, chairman of the House subcommittee on energy and the environment, was not amused: "It is outrageous that BP would kill the video feed for the top kill. This BP blackout will obscure a vital moment in this disaster," Markey said in a statement. "After more than a month of spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, BP is essentially saying to the American people the solution will not be televised."And in related news, Federal government inspectors overseeing oil drilling in the Gulf "accepted meals and tickets to sporting events from companies they monitored," reported the Interior Department's inspector general. Source: Boing Boing | 25 May 2010 | 6:01 pm Building an Ice Hotel: It's an Annual AffairTo keep the Icehotel in Sweden up and running, workers must harvest 3,000 2.2-ton blocks of ice from the nearby Torne river every spring.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 25 May 2010 | 6:00 pm Celebrating 35 Years of ILM MagicGeorge Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic may be the best special-effects studio ever. Wired looks back at some of its most influential work, from the liquid faces of T2 to the towering infernos in Jarhead.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 25 May 2010 | 6:00 pm Inside Foursquare: Checking In Before the Party Started (Part II)In the second of two parts, we join the founders at South By SouthWest, utter the "G" word and consider the iPhone conundrum.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 25 May 2010 | 6:00 pm Crafting a Joke: The Arc of an ActYou know instantly whether a joke works, says Chris Hardwick, who lets Wired in on how he has developed his comedy act.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 25 May 2010 | 6:00 pm Facebook to Announce Simpler Privacy Controls Tomorrow [Digital Daily]
In a Washington Post editorial Monday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged to simplify the privacy tools that have so befuddled its members and sparked complaints from privacy advocates and lawmakers alike. Tomorrow, we’ll find out just how he proposes to do that. Facebook has scheduled an event for Wednesday morning at 10:30 am PT to discuss what it claims are “enhanced, simpler privacy controls.” We’ll be covering the presentation live, so be sure to check in here in the morning. [Image Credit: Search Engine Land] Source: All Things Digital | 25 May 2010 | 5:55 pm Get a Palm Touchstone charging dock for a bargain priced $19.99 at Best BuySection: Communications, Cellphones, Smartphones, Mobile
The Touchstone is available for local store pickup as well as shipping. Of course, that second option will add another $3.99 to your purchase price. But still, even with the shipping included that is a pretty good deal for a Touchstone. It seems it may be time for me to pull the trigger on this purchase. Anyway, if interested visit Best Buy or hit the product link below… Product [Best Buy] Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 25 May 2010 | 5:49 pm Maveron Copes With a More Frugal Consumer [Voices]By Russell Garland, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal Maveron, a specialist investor in consumer-facing businesses known for its Starbucks Corp. (SBUX) connection and early success with an eBay Inc. (EBAY) investment, is staring at what looks like a once-in-a-lifetime shift in consumer attitudes. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, shoppers who once lusted after high-priced fashion brands have turned frugal, would-be early retirees are polishing off their job skills and many homeowners owe more than their houses are worth. “It’s pretty safe to say that you probably had a more dramatic shift in consumer behavior in the last two years than in the last 30 or 40 years,” said Maveron Partner Dan Levitan, who co-founded the firm in 1998 with Starbucks Chief Executive Howard Schultz. “People are less proud of indulgences and more focused on value.” But Maveron sees more opportunities than pitfalls in this trend. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 25 May 2010 | 5:30 pm Saving Coral Reefs With the Ultimate MapIf our goal is to kill coral reefs worldwide, we're doing a bang-up job. We've got runoff and development from the shore, fishing dredges by sea, acidification from warmer water temperatures, poisons, dynamite and spilled oil. Take that, coral! Now ...Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 25 May 2010 | 5:07 pm HP Tops IBM in Recovering Server Market, Gartner Says (PC World)PC World - Hewlett-Packard knocked IBM from the top spot in worldwide server revenue during the first quarter, as the market for x86 systems picked up but sales of Unix and mainframe systems continued to decline, Gartner said on Tuesday.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 May 2010 | 5:00 pm Black Hole Found in Unexpected PlaceDetailed Hubble images reveal a single supermassive black hole wandering away from its host galaxy's center where it belongs.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 25 May 2010 | 5:00 pm Long-haul travel savior: MiLi Power Skin (Christopher Null)Christopher Null - The iPhone may be many things, but it’s legendarily sad — even notoriously so — in the battery-life department.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 May 2010 | 4:59 pm LinkedIn Deepens Integration With Twitter; Becomes A Full-Fledged Client
Once you’ve installed the Tweets application, the “Overview” tab on your homepage will allows you to see everyone you currently follow on Twitter, view their Twitter feed, and Tweet from your own account. A new feature, Connections to Follow, has been added to recommend new people for you to follow, based on your LinkedIn connections. You can easily see all of your LinkedIn connections who have added Twitter accounts to their LinkedIn profiles and allows you to see who you are and aren’t following on Twitter. You can also see the Twitter information for any of your connections, follow or unfollow them, and even see a sample of their last tweet by hovering over their Twitter ID. And now you can save your LinkedIn connections as a dynamic Twitter list. When you choose to save your connections as a Twitter list, LinkedIn will create a private Twitter list for all of your LinkedIn connections that have added Twitter accounts. LinkedIn will keep this list up-to-date, adding and removing Twitter accounts to the list daily based on your LinkedIn connections. Clearly LinkedIn has added much more functionality to its Twitter platform, which seems to be popular. Of course while one million out of nearly 70 million users is still only a portion of its userbase, it still represents a large portion of members who have downloaded the app. LinkedIn is making a strong push to encourage users to share content on the site, and becoming a full-fledged Twitter client will only increase sharing on the platform. The obvious next step would be to integrate with Facebook in some way, but we probably shouldn’t hold our breath. Information provided by CrunchBase      
Source: TechCrunch | 25 May 2010 | 4:57 pm Secure Communication Comes To AndroidAn anonymous reader writes "Forbes is reporting that Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson's startup, Whisper Systems, has released a public beta of two Android applications that provide encrypted call and SMS capabilities for your Android phone. In the wake of recent GSM attacks, it'll be interesting to see if smartphones end up providing a platform that fundamentally changes the security we can expect from mobile communication."
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Source: Slashdot | 25 May 2010 | 4:51 pm Facebook Like Buttons Pop Up On Yahoo Sports
Latest to apparently add Facebook “like” buttons is Yahoo, which as we’ve written before seems to be happily outsourcing all that social nonsense to Zuckerberg & co lately. To see the integration in action, go to any MLB team on the Yahoo Sports website (e.g. the Cleveland Indians). On the right, right below the Teamtracker frame, you can “like” the team, after which your status will be updated with a link back to the page you’re on. Also shown is the number of people who have clicked the button before you. As far as we can tell, the deep integration of Facebook Connect buttons was publicly announced but the addition of like buttons to Yahoo Sports was not, or at least not yet.      
Source: TechCrunch | 25 May 2010 | 4:35 pm Google pulls Nexus One Android 2.2 Froyo update link from the webSection: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile, Web, Google
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 25 May 2010 | 4:31 pm Google Chrome OS Not Ready for Primetime Yet
When Computex kicks off next week, don’t expect to see any devices running Chrome OS. Computex, held every year in Taipei, Taiwan, is one of the largest trade shows for PC makers, and you’d think Google’s upcoming OS for netbooks would be a star attraction this year. But Google is still racing to finish the operating system, and consumers aren’t likely to see the first Chrome OS devices until late fall. Chrome OS will also be seen only in netbooks, at least at first, since the company isn’t encouraging Chrome OS for tablets. Instead it is steering tablet device makers towards Android, the first of which will be the Dell Streak that launches in the U.K. next month. “For Chrome, we are targeting the netbook form factor. The timeline for the first products is towards the end of the year,” a Google spokesman told Wired.com. Google introduced Chrome OS in November as a lightweight, browser-based operating system that would boot up in seven seconds or less. The company said at the time that the first Chrome OS netbooks would be available in the “second half of 2010.” Google is working with major netbook makers such as Acer, which is hoping to ship a million Chrome OS netbooks this year. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said Chrome OS netbooks will cost between $300 and $400, coming in line with devices running Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Earlier this month, a report suggested Acer could show its Chrome OS netbook as early as June, but Acer has denied it. “We have no short-term plans for such as product at Computex,” said an Acer statement on the company’s website. “Given Google’s emphasis on Android at its developer conference, it is unlikely that we are going to see much if any Chrome activity at Computex,” says Michael Gartenberg, partner at research and consulting firm The Altimeter Group. “Chrome is probably not ready for prime time.” If Google doesn’t move forward fast enough, it may lose ground to Microsoft’s Windows operating system, particularly among tablets. While they haven’t abandoned their Android plans, MSI and Asus both recently announced Windows 7-powered tablets. Chrome is visibly a work in progress. At its I/O developer conference last week, Google announced a web-based app store that will feature free and paid apps. The app store will be a big step forward to making Chrome an attractive OS, says Michael Cherry, vice-president of research for operating systems at independent research firm Directions on Microsoft. “The missing piece so far has been apps and with the web app store announcement Google is a step closer to the finish line,” says Cherry.
Apps are important for Chrome because Google has pitched it as a Linux-based, open-source operating system centered on Google’s Chrome browser. Applications will run exclusively inside the browser. Having easy access to those apps will be the key to the success of Chrome. The newly announced Chrome web store would do just that. When Google Chrome users install a web application from the store, a shortcut to quickly access the program. Meanwhile, Google has to do a fine balancing act between Chrome and Android. Chrome OS has been largely designed for netbooks and larger clamshell devices, while Android is aimed at smartphones. Tablets fall somewhere in the middle, potentially causing confusion about which OS is best suited to the form factor. For its part, Google has been telling partners to adopt the fast-growing Android for mobile devices and reserve Chrome for netbooks and laptops: machines that can actually deliver on the thin client promise. “Chrome is an open source project so anyone can take the code on any sort of device without telling us,” says the Google spokesman. “But we think Chrome and Android are two different approaches.” Google wouldn’t comment on if it will ever merge Chrome and Android. For now, Android is racing ahead, says Gartenberg. “Android has the resources and momentum, and it is run by Andy Rubin and his team,” Gartenberg says. “Chrome appears to have fewer resources and no clear leader, at least from the outsider’s perception. In the near term, Google’s efforts are going to be Android-based.” See Also:
Photo: (Travelin’ Librarian/Flickr) 
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 25 May 2010 | 4:31 pm Steve Case: AOL/Time Warner Merger May Have Worked Had I Played A More Active Role
One of the more interesting topics to come up during the conversation was whether or not Case thought the Time Warner merger was a good idea. Case hasn’t been directly involved with AOL for years — he left his role as CEO when AOL merged with Time Warner in 2000, and left the board of directors in 2005 — but he didn’t shy away from speaking about the company. Case said it was obviously clear in hindsight that the deal has been a disappointment. But he said that it’s hard to say whether he would have done anything differently with the merger, as AOL was at its peak at the time (Case and AOL shareholders did quite well). He also said that he thought the merger might have gone better had he been more involved with the transition.
Watch live streaming video from disrupt at livestream.com Here are my notes from the talk: Arrington: What keeps you going? Case: I love building stuff. For 25 years I was focused on AOL. Now instead of playing a direct operating role working with entrepreneurs, I’m funding around a dozen companies, and they’re all interesting to me. Arrington: You’re not doing it for the money, so it’s almost a hobby for you? Arrington: Last night we were talking about early days of AOL. You were talking about the number of users AOL had.. Case: We started in 85, went public in 1992, when we had 184k users. 7-8 years later it was like 25 million customers. And the nice thing was that each of those customers were paying 25 dollars a months. We like to say, those were the good old days. Arrington: Let’s talk about Revolution. What exactly is it? Case: Zipcar has 7000 cars. About 200 cities. It’s crazy to own a car in cities. Relying exclusively on taxis doesn’t work either. Instead of going to Hertz you can just walk a block away. Arrington: Of all the companies you’re invested in, which do you think about most? Case: LivingSocial is really on a tear. There were companies doing this 10 years ago, and it was mostly right but they didn’t have the right context. I think social media is changing that. Case: About three years ago a company wanted to do Facebook apps… LivingSocial. They tried figuring out how to monetize that, and about a year ago they pivoted. Went from being a thin to a fat ‘speedup’. 30 employees to 130 in the last six months. I think ‘grouponing’ will be an important segment. Probably a few big companies built. Arrington: Is the idea at all relevent to Amazon? Case: I don’t think it’s irrelevant. I think they probably look at it as more an opportunity than a threat. These companies are really picking a deal or a market. Interesting business or interesting business model. Merchants like that it generates new customers and zero risk. Arrington: What do you think about Tim Armstrong as CEO for AOL? Arrington: Yesterday on stage John Doerr talked about the ‘third wave’. What do you think, does that ring true? Case: I think what we’ve shifted to is that having spent a lot of timing building core infrastructure and platforms, now you can shift to different things. Embedding these things in other areas. ZipCar for example, it’s enabled by the internet and couldn’t make it without the internet. These companies don’t have to be on the Internet itself, but how you build on it in other industries. Healthcare will probably be a big thing here. Q&A: Q: Looking back on merger what would you have done differently? Arrington: If you hadn’t merged where would the company be today?      
Source: TechCrunch | 25 May 2010 | 4:27 pm Iraq: CIA's aborted psyops stunt to discredit Saddam? "Pedo-Hussein" sex tapes
In the run-up to America's 2003 invasion of Iraq, a CIA team brainstormed ways to attack public perception of Saddam Hussein among Iraqis. One of the psyops plans was to "flood Iraq with videos" that depicted the dictator having sex with a teenage boy. The CIA hoax "hidden camera" videos were to be shot "very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session," according to a former official familiar with the plan.
The agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys, one of the former CIA officers recalled, chuckling at the memory. The actors were drawn from "some of us darker-skinned employees," he said.Man oh man, my kingdom for a torrent. Anyway, just one problem with the CIA's man-boy-love-tape plans:
"Saddam playing with boys would have no resonance in the Middle East -- nobody cares," [said a] former CIA official with extensive experience in the region. "Trying to mount such a campaign would show a total misunderstanding of the target. We always mistake our own taboos as universal when, in fact, they are just our taboos."CIA unit's wacky idea: Depict Saddam as gay (Washington Post) Source: Boing Boing | 25 May 2010 | 4:09 pm Why Windows 7 "Slate" Tablets Won't Happensnydeq writes "InfoWorld's Galen Gruman questions the viability of Windows 7 on tablets in the wake of the news that HP will use Palm's WebOS as the foundation for iPad rivals, rather than follow through with the previously hyped Windows 7-based Slate. 'The iPad proved a tablet shouldn't be a portable computer that happened to have its screen always exposed. Even though technical components are shared between the Mac OS and the iPhone OS, the irrelevant Mac OS functions aren't gumming up the iPhone OS, and Apple's development environment doesn't let you pull through desktop approaches into your mobile applications. You're forced to go touch-native,' Gruman writes, adding that, when it comes to touch capabilities, Windows 7 leaves much to be desired. 'Sure, a few Windows 7 slate-style tablets will ship — Asus and MSI are said to have models shipping later this year. But those products will go nowhere, because Windows 7 is simply not the right operating system for a slate.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 25 May 2010 | 4:09 pm New Crater May Have Helped Create Antarctic Ice SheetA giant impact dome was discovered under the Timor Sea. This is one of many impacts that pummeled the planet around 35 million years ago, possibly cooling it enough to spur the formation of ice sheets on Antarctica.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 25 May 2010 | 4:08 pm Half-Life 2 launching on Macs this WednesdayIt’s so appropriate yet sad that Alyx is tasked with announcing the six-year old Half-Life 2’s Mac launch. But really there’s no shame in playing the some-what old Half-Life 2 even today. It’s one of the games that we agreed with in PC Gamer’s top games of all time list. But it’s yet another sign that the Mac gaming scene still has a long way to go.
Source: CrunchGear | 25 May 2010 | 4:05 pm “Plantly Is An Investment Tool That Aims Not To Suck”
Title aside, Planty is a risk-aware investment tool. They use a lot of advanced tools to show users exactly what will happen to their investments based on various scenarios. “We want you to touch this to get a feel for what will happen to your money,” is the way they put it. They are not a broker, this is just a tool. If you have a broker, you can put their fees in the tool to add those into the system as well. The whole idea is to put a plan in place — it’s not about rushing to invest. The business model mainly resides in the follow-up services. For example, you can use other tools to see how your investment is actually doing versus how you thought it would do. They also charge $10 for access to the system — but that’s just a one-time fee. But again, the key to all of this is the design and simplicity of the service. Plantly wants to make what’s going to happen to your money obvious. They don’t care if you invest or not — they just hope that by showing you this info, that if you do choose to invest, you’ll use some of their more advanced (paid) tools. ———-Q&A With The Judges—————- Jason Calacanis, CEO & Founder, Mahalo Q: This is great. It’s like the good things about Mint. You expressed it well. Q: It was a very nice product. Very easy to use. Who is your competition in this market. A: We’re learning about more and more of them — like Betterment, which launched here yesterday. But we’re not brokers, they are. We’re about our interface design. Q: Is this only ETFs? A: Yes, only ETF. Q: How it’s different from something like MorningStar. A: The information is different and we’re heavily involved in the plan for the future. The information in advance is important. MorningStar has too much information. This is about just the right amount of information. Smart decisions are the key. Q: I think these are the two best product guys we’ve seen all day. At the end of the day it’s clear what your proposition is. I love the product. Q: You guys didn’t earn your way onto stage — but you were the best presentation of the whole group. You guys were elegant with how you think about the space. Where are you guys from? A: Originally from Israel. Now in Brooklyn. Q: What’s your qualification in the financial space. A: No, it’s all from my MBA and working at Proctor & Gamble. Q: This is about protecting people and protecting their money. ——– The Monetization Plan —————– They’re still in beta so they’re figuring out the monetization strategy. They’re thinking about some 40% of investors in the longtail. $10 is cheap enough for people to get into this, they think. Again, the idea isn’t to push people to invest, but if they do, give them more tools. “Affiliating through need is the wrong thing for our customers,” —————– Second Q & A ————— Q: How will you acquire customers? A: Again, around 40% of people first go to friends and family. And being here is a good start. Q: What wealth level are you talking about? A: $5,000 for a single investment. For the middle class small investors. Q: So you should go to Walmart or get people through 401k. Q: Protecting wealth is a great message, you could do all sorts of things — make videos. Q: Plantly in some ways reminds me of a social game. Maybe as you’re managing it, a plant grows. The leaves represent your financial life. A: Thank you, we are having discussions about game mechanics. Q: You guys are brand-able too. Make videos! Watch live streaming video from disrupt at livestream.com
     
Source: TechCrunch | 25 May 2010 | 4:04 pm Idaho Department of Labor and TALX Hold Joint Meetings to Improve Unemployment Insurance ProcessesST. LOUIS, May 25 /PRNewswire/ -- The Idaho Department of Labor and TALX have announced a number of key initiatives resulting from joint meetings held in St. Louis, May 24 and 25, 2010. The meetings were in response to a letter from Mr.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 25 May 2010 | 3:58 pm Keenkong Manages The Social Media Overload For Marketers
So when you click on a segment in Keenkong, you can see the related conversations according to a particular topic. Keenkong’s linguistic processing engine extracts live why people are talking, what are they talking about, who they are and it segments messages accordingly. Keenkong automatically captures, parses and groups incoming messages from Twitter (including lists and searches) and Facebook. For example, Keenkong will segment Tweets about users choosing between your brand and another into one category. Or Keenkong will create a segment of Tweets and updates where a brand should thank the consumer for highlighting a positive aspect of a brand. It essentially allows marketers to break down conversations by actionable insights vs. sentiment or even topic. And the categorization of these actions makes it fairly simple to marketers to prioritize actions. Plus, Keenkong provides users with analytics around engagement and interaction with a brand on Twitter and Facebook. The social media monitoring space is crowded-with a number of worthy competitors in the space, including Scout Labs, PeopleBrowsr, ViralHeat and more. But, Keenkong’s application seems to provide a unique approach to the monitoring space, so many brand marketers are sure to find the application useful. TG: What’s different about what you are doing? Watch live streaming video from disrupt at livestream.com
Information provided by CrunchBase      
Source: TechCrunch | 25 May 2010 | 3:38 pm This Sony Vaio P takes the style to another level
Maybe the standard Sony Vaio P is a bit pedestrian for your taste. It’s just not enough, right? Well then, how about one covered with crocodile skin? It’s supposed to be a digital clutch anyway. Pricing info isn’t available, but it’s not going to be low-cost. The model’s spec’d out with the Atom Z560 Intel US15X chipset, 256GB SSD, and optional 12-hour battery. Plus all that crocodile skin can’t be cheap. [SonyBrands via eeepc via liliputing]
Source: CrunchGear | 25 May 2010 | 3:38 pm Global "Last Mile" Performance Stats Going PublicOokla, the company behind Speedtest.net, Pingtest.net, and the bandwidth testing apps deployed at many ISPs, has gone public with Net performance stats from 1.5 billion users (and counting). Their Net Index page displays download speed, upload speed, and connection "quality" from the EU and the G8, to countries, worldwide cities, and US states. Beginning today, the company is also making detailed (anonymized) data available to academics. "Ookla will also start surveying users about how much they pay for broadband and how much bandwidth they were promised by their ISPs. The results of those questions will go into building a Value Index, which will show how much people around the world pay per megabit-per-second for Internet access. In addition, by collecting postal codes from Speedtest users, Ookla hopes to map broadband service to local economic conditions, Apgar said. The Speedtest data could give the US government far more information to work with in setting priorities for its National Broadband Plan..."
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Source: Slashdot | 25 May 2010 | 3:28 pm Screw The Gallery, Discover The Next Great Picasso At Art.sy
The new social site, started by Carter Cleveland, is “the place to discover and share original fine art online.” Okay, it’s easy to say that. But Art.sy’s approach is to make it easy to discover this art through searching. Their custom search engine allows you to find art by period/style, the portion of their career that the artist is in, or the regular stuff like size, color, and, of course, price. They’ll also recommend new art to you based on preferences from your social graph. And there’s a Facebook application to leverage the largest social graph. Plus they believe the Art.sy domain will be key for sharing art on Twitter. They also hint that an iPad app is coming. “Although art is best viewed in person, you can’t fall in love with it unless you’ve discovered it first,” they write on their site. Obviously, this is a niche site, but fine art = money. And even if you’re not looking to buy, you can visit to learn more about artists or particular works of art. It’s culture online. And once you’re ready to buy a piece of art, you can talk directly to the artist or gallery to negotiate a fair price. Or you can arrange a viewing if you’re not sure about the piece. And, of course, you can share your purchases on Facebook, Twitter, etc. ———-Q&A With The Judges—————- Jason Calacanis, CEO & Founder, Mahalo Q: How does this not exist already? And do the art galleries want to give it to you? A: The key to this is deals with art houses. The competitors is Art Net — which is a great resource if you know the artist you’re looking for. Q: Are the auction houses part of your system? A: No, just the galleries. Q: Will regular people be able to put art on there? A: Not at first, because we want to make it about fine art only. Q: There should be a feedback system — Q&A system in here. Q: Is there a consumer demand in this? Isn’t inefficiency in this? A: We got our initial funding from people who were frustrated by this. Q: I didn’t think it was too original. I remember nextmonet.com — this is well done, but exclusive access to art isn’t huge. A: You have to be more like Steve Jobs during the presentation. You had one, but the tech fucked it up. You missed the “wow.” Watch live streaming video from disrupt at livestream.com
Information provided by CrunchBase      
Source: TechCrunch | 25 May 2010 | 3:26 pm BlackBerry Bold 9800 caught on video, get a nice glimpse of OS 6.0 and the slider in actionSection: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile  Image courtesy: The Berry Fix It looks like today has brought more on the yet-to-be-announced BlackBerry Bold 9800 slider, and this time its a nice 3 minute and 39 second video. And a surprisingly clear video at that. Anyway, the video is offering a nice look at the BlackBerry Bold 9800 in action. In other words, you get to watch the sliding portion of the phone slide. Exciting, I know. But thankfully there is more to the video than just that. In addition, we are also given a pretty good look at BlackBerry OS 6.0 and a few of its goodies such as the virtual keyboard, pinch and zoom capabilities, coverflow-like album art and more. Oh, and we cannot forget that AT&T splash screen in the beginning. I guess the Bold 9800 slider is going to be heading to AT&T. Now if we could just find out when and for how much. Watch [YouTube] Via [The Berry Fix] Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 25 May 2010 | 3:20 pm Movieclips Wants To Drink Other Movie Clips Sites’ Milkshake With Mashups
The key to this (beyond a killer domain name, movieclips.com) is that they have partnerships with six major Hollywood studios to provide them with clips from films. How many clips? So far, over 12,000. Imagine if the studios could make some older clips relevant again? And what if users could do it themselves? That’s what this new Mashups products is trying to do. Movieclips went to the studios, pitching them directly about the idea. Co-founders Zach James and Rich Raddon had two key selling points: “How do you make movies more social?” and “How do you make movies more relevant?” The first question is nothing new (you make it easy to share the clips on the various social networks). But the second questions is interesting. For example, how do you take Top Gun – a movie which is 25 years old — and make it relevant to a 15-year-old? There’s a way — it’s a great movie — they just have to provide context with something relevant today. That’s where the mashup component of their service comes into play. For example, on stage, they showed a bunch of clips from a bunch of movies to play out the Tiger Woods sex scandal — think: The Ladies Man. You can also make e-cards of sorts for friends. Is someone sick? Just make them a mashup of a bunch of vomiting scenes from movies! What fun! And it’s not just quantity. Movieclips also believes its product is superior to the others out there because they tag each of these clips with up to 1,000 pieces of metadata (dialogue, actors, moods, etc). This makes the clips very searchable — and they’ve had 30 part-time employees working on this, so it’s more reliable than machine-tagged data. Last year at TechCrunch 50, AnyClip debuted with a similar idea. But there’s one key difference: they didn’t have the licensing agreements yet. They still don’t. Movieclips does, and that could make it a killer product. Movieclips launched its main product (the clip search engine) in beta this past December and released an API in March. ———-Q&A With The Judges—————- Jason Calacanis, CEO & Founder, Mahalo Q: That was a perfect presentation. Q: Yeah, the movie clip idea is difficult. But how do you make it unique? A: The domain is important (movieclips.com). We can also syndicate our player out. We have 2 dozen portals we’re talking to right now. Yes, the clips we get aren’t only ours. Q: What are the three revenue streams? A: We’ll give one now — subscription revenue. Q: It’s a pretty thing, but technically it’s not that difficult. This is won on distribution. A: Yeah, when we launched we decided distribution was key. We need to make all these deals — like AOL. Q: You had great video source material. But the clip is derivative. This isn’t anything that innovative. One excellent thing: you bought a great domain name. Two: you got the clips. How did you get those? A: We were stealth and working on getting the deals before we did anything. So pre-launch we had 5 deals in place. AnyClips was the opposite. We do ad-rev split. ———- The Monetization Portion ———— It was really hard to get these deals. No one has ever done this before. We were able to give them both a piece of the ad revenue and analytics. Our plan to make money: 1) We’ll have a subscription plan across our distribution. There’s a lot of upselling on our site too. 2) Advertising — You can get a good CPM on these. 3) Transaction — This isn’t our focus, but we did this anyway. In a few weeks time we’ll have a “buy” button. That’s an exclusive deal. It’s for businesses — if you want to use a clip in a demo, you can do it. It’s all about our great tags. We have 30 people doing it. And we’ll crowd-source it too. ———– Second Q&A —————– Q: You guys need to be more direct about the issues. Terrible presentation. I wouldn’t invest. A: We’re working on a round right now. Q: How much traffic do you need to hit? A: 3 million uniques is what we want to hit. And I think we will. Q: In the first presentation you killed it, but you were tired here. I think you should talk about micro-transactions too. This could be a huge app on Facebook. Think JibJab. An iPhone app too. I would also knock on Microsoft’s door everyday. Tell them they need to use your clips.
Information provided by CrunchBase      
Source: TechCrunch | 25 May 2010 | 3:13 pm mTouch: An affordable multi-touch web table
The best thing? It costs $3,200 for the 32-inch model and $4,200 for the 42-incher. The table is made by Merel Technologies in New York and it uses a stacked multi-touch layer (looks like IR) along with an LCD TV to display the interface. A built-in PC runs the whole thing and you can tear it down to create a coffee-table sized device. You can also customize colors. Interestingly, the gear is assembled in New York. The goal here, it seems, is to allow customers access to multi-touch displays for not much money. It’s no Surface, but the company is working on an App Store which allows you to browse devices via Bluetooth, browse photos and classifieds, or even access video and restaurant menus right from your table. We saw something similar in iTable, which was a little more PC and a little less Surface — but also going for the lower price point.
Source: CrunchGear | 25 May 2010 | 3:10 pm Dycom Announces Fiscal 2010 Third Quarter ResultsA Tele-Conference call to review the Company's results will be hosted at 9 a.m. (ET), Wednesday, May 26, 2010; Call 800-230-1074 (United States) or 612-288-0329 (International) and request "Dycom Results" conference call.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 25 May 2010 | 2:58 pm Salesforce.com Grants Equity Awards Under Its Inducement Equity Incentive PlanSAN FRANCISCO, May 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing company, today reported that it granted equity awards under its 2006 Inducement Equity Incentive Plan (the "Plan") to new employees of salesforce.com in connection with its previously announced acquisition of Jigsaw Data Corporation ("Jigsaw").Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 25 May 2010 | 2:50 pm Polar Bears Face "Tipping Point"As sea ice fragments due to to climate change, polar bear populations may at first show very little ill effect, but then drop precipitously.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 25 May 2010 | 2:48 pm Privacy MachiavellisChris Jay Hoofnagle has a piece up at SFGate.com on what he calls the "privacy Machiavellis," which are exemplified by Google and Facebook. (The article is adapted from a longer treatment published last year, called "Beyond Google and Evil.") Hoofnagle heads the privacy foundation set up with money collected from settlements of privacy lawsuits against Facebook. From SFGate: "...you have no way to ask Google to stop this tracking. Instead, you can merely opt-out of the targeted advertising — the product recommendations. Exercising your privacy options creates a worst-case-scenario outcome: If you opt out, you are still tracked, but you do not receive the putative benefit of targeted ads. An illusory opt-out system is just one of the increasingly sophisticated sleights of hand in the privacy world. Consider Facebook's privacy options. .... Facebook can proudly proclaim that it offers ... more than 100 [choices]. Therein lies the trick; by offering too many choices, individuals are likely to choose poorly, or not at all. Facebook benefits because poor choices or paralysis leads consumers to reveal more personal information. In any case, the fault is the consumer's, because, after all, they were given a choice. Reader Kilrah_il sends word that Google has just released a tool that could alleviate some of the above worries: it stops tracking by Google Analytics for users of IE7+, Firefox 3.5+, and Chrome 4+. Perhaps Hoofnagle will comment on it here or elsewhere.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 25 May 2010 | 2:46 pm Ezenia! Inc. Announces Release of MxM SecureNASHUA, N.H., May 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Ezenia! Inc.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 25 May 2010 | 2:42 pm IBM Unveils Software to Help Insurance Carriers Get Closer to Customers, Improve AgilityARMONK, N.Y., May 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled a packaged software offering to help insurance carriers boost client service, increase agility, optimize business efficiency, and better manage risk.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 25 May 2010 | 2:30 pm IBM 2010 Global CEO Study: Only 53 Percent of Insurance CEOs Are Confidently Managing ComplexityARMONK, N.Y., May 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Only half of IBM's (NYSE: IBM) survey of Insurance CEOs believe their enterprises are adequately prepared to handle a highly volatile, increasingly complex business environment according to a new report by IBM.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 25 May 2010 | 2:30 pm Amazon now offering the Verizon Wireless and AT&T branded Palm Pre Plus for one pennySection: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile  The Palm Pre Plus is officially an affordable smartphone, that is, if you shop by way of Amazon. As of now, those interested can pick up either the Verizon Wireless Pre Plus or the AT&T Pre Plus for one penny. Of course, that one penny is a on contract price and it means a two year agreement. Still, its hard to argue with a smartphone priced almost free. Sadly though, those still hoping to score an original Pre with Sprint are going to have to pay, and pay a whopping $79. Product [Palm Pre Plus on Verizon] Product [Palm Pre Plus on AT&T] Via [webOS roundup] Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 25 May 2010 | 2:15 pm SNES HD emulator for iPad looks sick – even the iPhone controller
The iPhone connects over Bluetooth and you even use the physical buttons for the L and R buttons. To be honest I doubt it controls all that well, but it’s better than having it all on one screen. Someone PLEASE make a decent controller for this thing already. I love the save state pictures and the actual console in the interface. Man, I really want an iPad now. Did I mention it’s free? More info at the creator’s site. [via iPhoneblog.de, Kotaku]
Source: CrunchGear | 25 May 2010 | 2:15 pm Ingram Micro Executive to Present at Upcoming Investor EventSANTA ANA, Calif., May 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Ingram Micro Inc.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 25 May 2010 | 2:15 pm Google Releases Chrome 5.0 For Win/Mac/Linuxddfall writes "Four months after the release of version 4.0 for Windows, Google has announced the availability of Chrome 5.0 for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux — the first stable release to be available on all three major platforms. Chrome 5.0.375.55 is available to download from google.com/chrome. Users who currently have Chrome installed can use the built-in update function."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 25 May 2010 | 2:14 pm Has the 8GB iPhone 3G been discontinued? - CNET
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 25 May 2010 | 2:01 pm There will be a Mass Effect movie. Will Lost’s Matthew Fox play Commander Shepard?
It’s takes a special type of nerd to read a video game’s novelization, and I’m none too proud to say that I recently started reading the Mass Effect novel. But there’s a certain quiet dignity in reading a novelization that simply isn’t present when sitting at the multiplex (or downloading the Blu-ray rip, as it were) watching a movie. Get ready: EA has sold the movie rights to Mass Effect, and it’s gone to Legendary Pictures, the same people behind The Dark Knight, Watchmen, and The Hangover. So there’s hope the movie won’t be total dross. Several of the BioWare folks, including Ray Muzyka and Mass Effect project manager Casey Hudson, will be a part of the production, so there’s even more evidence that the movie has the potential to be OK. It’s being written by the man who wrote I Am Legend, Mark Protosevich. I never understood how you can be credited with writing a movie when all you’re doing is remaking it… The thing is, Mass Effect is already so cinematic that making a movie seems like overkill. Just play the game; I’m almost certain the movie won’t be as good as the game was. Stating the obvious: Commander Shepard needs to be played by Matthew Fox, the guy who played Jack in “Lost.” They look identical.
Source: CrunchGear | 25 May 2010 | 1:45 pm Hiker Says Climate Is Changing EverestA Nepalese Sherpa said on Tuesday, after breaking his own record by making a 20th ascent of Mount Everest, that the world's highest peak is getting more dangerous to climb because of climate change.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 25 May 2010 | 1:40 pm Via to flood the US market with five sub-$150 Android tablets by year’s end
Via’s upcoming tablets are of course in response to the iPad and is a classic CE move. Instead of producing a quality product, a company, in this case Via, is outing a whole range of low-cost (and likely cheap) alternatives. This move hopefully won’t earn 2010 the title of year of the tablet alone. In fact there’s a chance that it could harm the consumer’s interest in the slate form factor. The iPad isn’t perfect by any means, but it is showing the entire consumer electronic market that they want and need a tablet computer with its slick user experience. However, it’s still an elite-type device with the $500+ price tag and obviously a low-cost Via model will capture some sales of those looking to be part of the cool crowd. However if these tablets fail to provide a good experience, it might turn off an entire market segment to tablets in general.
Source: CrunchGear | 25 May 2010 | 1:15 pm Rumor: American Beauty Director to Shoot 4G iPhone Ads
At least one spot will show a mother and daughter using the iPhone’s front-facing camera for a video-conferencing call, a tipster told Engadget. (Jetsons, anyone?) Most of us already expected this was a feature, because we saw the new camera on the prototype iPhone leaked by Gizmodo (right). Gizmodo’s publication of the device led to a police seizure, and two weeks ago the unsealed affidavit revealed that Apple legal confirmed the device was a prototype of the fourth-generation iPhone. Corroborating its rumor, Engadget found statements on Twitter from actors claiming they were auditioning for an Apple ad, though that’s not substantial evidence to “confirm” that Mendes is shooting fourth-gen iPhone ads, as the blog suggests. Nonetheless, many expect Apple to introduce its next-generation iPhone soon at the Worldwide Developers Conference kicking off June 7. At the same venue, Apple debuted the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS in years past. See Also:
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 25 May 2010 | 1:02 pm Google Pac-Man logo could have wasted 4,819,352 hours & cost $120,483,800Section: Web, Websites, Google  Thanks to the team over at the Rescue Time Blog, math, Wolfram Alpha and Google we have some crazy numbers based off of the playable Pac-Man logo that Google ran on its homepage last week.
Interestingly, it was also noted that;
I guess I am not your average nerd, because I wasted much more than 36 seconds. And no I will not share my number because its just plain sad. But remember, as Greg mentioned yesterday, that version is Pac-Man is still alive and kicking and ready for more time wasting. Read [Rescue Time] Via [Slashdot]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 25 May 2010 | 1:01 pm Super Mario Bro. Crossover gets Ryu from Ninja GaidenCan you dig it? Ryu from Ninja Gaiden on the NES was a real badass. He could climb on walls and he had unlimited shuriken, a big plus when you’re going against hordes of anti-ninja forces on the NES. But how is he against Koopa Troopers? Our favorite game, SMB Crossover, just announced they’re adding Ryu to their line-up of classic characters.
Source: CrunchGear | 25 May 2010 | 12:54 pm Shadow is the Likely Successor to Motorola Droid
The Shadow phone may be another device exclusive to Verizon and will be packed with features that could put it among the best in the market. The phone will have a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. It will sport a 8-megapixel camera that can shoot 720p video, have a 4.3-inch display, an HDMI port and 16 GB of internal storage, says Gizmodo. That sounds a lot like the HTC EVO 4G phone on Sprint, minus the blazing-fast 4G data connection. Shadow is also likely to run Android FroYo or Android 2.2, the latest version of the operating system that allows tethering and the ability to turn the phone into a wireless hotspot. There’s no word though on whether Adobe’s Flash Player 10.1 will run on the Shadow. And in keeping the precedent set by Apple of losing prototype phones, the latest Shadow prototype was reportedly found left behind in a corporate Verizon gym. The phone was remotely locked, says the guy who found it. But at least this time around, it looks like no one paid money to get a peek at the device. See Also:
Photo: Motorola Shadow/Gizmodo 
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 25 May 2010 | 12:37 pm Yankee Stadium Bans Apple iPad - PC Magazine
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 25 May 2010 | 12:35 pm Verizon exec hits the gym, loses the unreleased Motorola Shadow instead of weight
Note to self: keep an eye out for unreleased smartphones in ridiculous places. Hanging out in a random beer garden in Palo Alto? Oh, hello there, fourth-generation iPhone. Hitting the gym? Lookie here, it’s the unreleased Motorola Shadow Android phone for Verizon! Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>
Source: CrunchGear | 25 May 2010 | 12:30 pm Lamp poster (poster lamp?) adds a surrealist bent to your bedroom
The piece, which is not a concept and is actually for sale, though it is limited to 50 pieces. It was designed quite a while ago, but only recently was actually made available — at $195 it’s slightly more expensive than your average poster of a lamp, but unlike most other posters, this one lights up. [via OhGizmo]
Source: CrunchGear | 25 May 2010 | 12:30 pm Solar Observatory Predicts Comet ExterminationWatching a comet get destroyed by the sun is a lot of fun if you can predict when it's going to happen. A group of Berkeley researchers have done just that, tracking a comet deep into the solar atmosphere.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 25 May 2010 | 12:30 pm Global Death Rates Dropping for Children Under 5Global death rates are decreasing for young children, particularly in some regions of Latin America, north Africa and the Middle East.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 25 May 2010 | 12:26 pm Goodnight, sweet iPhone: Apple pulls iPhone 3G sales from their online store You know what's coming up in just a few days? Apples Worldwide Developer Conference. With WWDC comes new iPhones.. and with new iPhones, comes the death of an old one. Apple may very well still offer the 3GS after the fourth-generation iPhone is on the shelves -- but offering the fourth-gen iPhone, the 3GS, and the 3G? Probably not going to happen.
The first herald of the iPhone 3G's impending death has come.
Source: CrunchGear | 25 May 2010 | 12:15 pm Polar Bears Threatened By Climate ChangeA new study has found that climate change will trigger a dramatic and sudden decline in the number of polar bears. The research is the first to directly model how changing climate will affect polar bear reproduction and survival.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 25 May 2010 | 12:11 pm Holiday Inn to trial mobile-as-room-key program next month
Your phone is now your hotel key. Well, could be your hotel key. Holiday Inn will trial new software for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android that will let you use your phone to open your hotel door. Even better: you can use the software to check out without having to futz around at the check-in desk. Convenient. The trail begins later next month in two hotels, the Holiday Inn Chicago O’Hare Rosemont and the Holiday Inn Express Houston Downtown Convention Center. The trial will last for 60 days, and if all goes well, the program could be expanded across the country. Incidentally, using your smartphone as your key would help eliminate the problem of room keys becoming de-magnitized. That happened to me once after I left my phone and my hotel key in the same pocket. “Well this is peculiar, the key doesn’t work anymore. I sure hope the front desk will be able to help.” And they did, and I was thankful. A quick story, yes.
Source: MobileCrunch | 25 May 2010 | 12:00 pm Yankees to iPad: You’re out!Section: Apple
Read [CNet] Full Story » | Written by Sue Walsh for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 25 May 2010 | 11:54 am Goodnight, sweet iPhone: Apple pulls iPhone 3G sales from their online store
You know what’s coming up in just a few days? Apples Worldwide Developer Conference. With WWDC comes new iPhones.. and with new iPhones, comes the death of an old one. Apple may very well still offer the 3GS after the fourth-generation iPhone is on the shelves — but offering the fourth-gen iPhone, the 3GS, and the 3G? Probably not going to happen. The first herald of the iPhone 3G’s impending death has come.
Sometime early this morning, Apple pulled the “Select” button off of the iPhone purchasing page. If you want an iPhone from Apple’s online store right this second, you’re buying a 3GS — or, you know, waiting a few weeks and getting the new toy, or at least getting the 3GS a few bills less after the inevitable price drop. [Via Engadget]
Source: MobileCrunch | 25 May 2010 | 11:12 am Verizon exec hits the gym, loses the unreleased Motorola Shadow instead of weight
Note to self: keep an eye out for unreleased smartphones in ridiculous places. Hanging out in a random beer garden in Palo Alto? Oh, hello there, fourth-generation iPhone. Hitting the gym? Lookie here, it’s the unreleased Motorola Shadow Android phone for Verizon!
The tale, as it goes so far: an employee at a Verizon corporate gym in Washington was doing his rounds, and stumbled upon the handset you see above. He unlocked it — presumably to identify who owned it — and spotted a text confirming that the handset was unreleased. He snapped a pic and sent it off to Gizmodo, dialed up the person they figured was the owner, and away it went into the hands of an unnamed Verizon employee — but not before the spy-shot taker was allegedly able to confirm the 16 gigs of internal storage, Snapdragon processor, 4.3 inch screen, and the 8 megapixel camera.
Source: MobileCrunch | 25 May 2010 | 11:03 am Boost Mobile’s pre-paid, Android-powered Motorola i1 to cost $349.99
When we dug up some evidence yesterday that Boost Mobile would be getting the US’s first pre-paid Android phone in the form of Motorola’s crazy-tough, push-to-talk i1, there was one bit we were missing: the price. Fortunately, that didn’t stay a secret for very long.
MobileCrunch reader Tyrel found the item lurking around on the depths of Best Buy’s own site. As of right this second, this pre-paid, no-contract handset is set to cost you $349.99 out the door. Alas, still no word on a launch date.
Source: MobileCrunch | 25 May 2010 | 10:50 am It’s official; Steve Jobs keynote to open WWDCFROM APPLETELL - Monday, June 7th, Apple’s Steve Jobs will kickoff WWDC with a keynote address. With the recent Google Android announcements at their I/O conference, it has got to be something big. Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 25 May 2010 | 10:44 am Coastal Birds Carry Toxic Ocean Metals InlandQueen’s-led study links metal contamination of Arctic ponds to seabirds’ dietsA collaborative research team led by Queen's University biologists has found that potent metals like mercury and lead, ingested by Arctic seabirds feeding in the ocean, end up in the sediment of polar ponds."Birds feeding on different diets will funnel different 'cocktails' of metal contaminants from the ocean back to terrestrial ecosystems, which can then affect other living organisms," says lead author Neal Michelutti, a research scientist at Queen's Paleoecological Environmental Assessment and Research Lab (PEARL).The study will be published on-line the week of May 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.The team collected sediment cores from two ponds on a small island in the Canadian Arctic that is home to the nests of two kinds of seabirds: Arctic terns, which feed primarily on fish, and common eider ducks which feed mainly on mollusks. The researchers analyzed the pond sediment for metals and other indicators of the birds' activity.They found significant differences between the samples that aligned with the birds' diets. There were higher concentrations of metals such as mercury and cadmium in the sites inhabited by terns, while the nearby eider site recorded higher amounts of lead, manganese, and aluminum. The patterns of metals in the sediment cores matched those recorded in the different bird species' tissues.Queen's biology professor John Smol says the findings can be applied to other locations. "The High Arctic is an excellent 'natural laboratory' to undertake such studies, due to the lack of local industries," notes Dr. Smol, Canada Research Chair in Environmental Change, and winner of the 2004 NSERC Herzberg Gold Medal as Canada's top scientist. "However, the presence of seabirds on every continent suggests similar processes are operating along coastlines worldwide."Our concern is that these areas of elevated metals and other contaminants occur exactly where biological activity is greatest," he adds."The seabirds are obviously not directly to blame for the elevated metal concentrations in the ponds," says team member Jules Blais, a biology professor from the University of Ottawa. "They are simply carrying out their natural behaviors and lifecycles, but have become unwitting vectors of pollutants in an increasingly industrial age." Other members of the multidisciplinary team include Queen's biology undergraduate student Jaclyn Brash and PhD candidate Joshua Thienpont, Linda Kimpe from the University of Ottawa, Marianne Douglas (University of Alberta) and Mark Mallory (the Canadian Wildlife Service).This research was funded primarily by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Polar Continental Shelf Program (PCSP).---Image Caption: Arctic terns have the longest yearly migration of any bird species, with some individuals covering 80,000 km annually. Metals and other contaminants accumulated over their long journeys are ultimately deposited near their nesting sites, in some instances to toxic concentrations. Credit: Mark MallorySource: RedOrbit News - Science | 25 May 2010 | 10:12 am Evolving from beta to stable with a faster version of ChromeAfter a bit of evolution and lots of work from the team, we’re thrilled to introduce a new stable version of Chrome for Windows, Mac and Linux. Since last December, we’ve been chipping away at bugs and building in new features to get the Mac and Linux versions caught up with the Windows version, and now we can finally announce that the Mac and Linux versions are ready for prime time.   Google Chrome for LinuxThe performance bar for all three versions keeps getting higher: today’s new stable release for Windows, Mac and Linux is our fastest yet, incorporating one of our most significant speed improvements to date. We’ve improved by 213 percent and 305 percent in Javascript performance by the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks since our very first beta, back in Chrome’s Cretaceous period (September 2008). To mark these speed improvements, we’ve also released a series of three unconventional speed tests for the browser: (If you’re interested in how we pitted Chrome against the forces of a potato gun, lightning, and the speed of sound, take a look behind-the-scenes in this video, or read the full technical details in the video’s description drop-down in YouTube). You may also notice that today’s new stable release comes with a few new features, including the ability to synchronize browser preferences across computers, new HTML5 capabilities and a revamped bookmark manager. For more details, read on in the Google Chrome Blog. If you haven't tried Google Chrome since the stone age, check out this brand new stable release. If you're already using Chrome, you'll be automatically updated to this new version soon. To try it right away, download the latest version at google.com/chrome.  Posted by Brian Rakowski, Product Manager, Google Chrome    
 Source: The Official Google Blog | 25 May 2010 | 10:06 am E. Coli 0157:H7 Present But Not Common In Wildlife Of Nation’s Salad BowlThe disease-causing bacterium E.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 25 May 2010 | 10:03 am Is this a Droid running Android 2.2?
Source: MobileCrunch | 25 May 2010 | 9:52 am Shuttle Jokes Fall Flat During Stephen Colbert InterviewSometimes, even the best comedians get it wrong. Making jokes about the shuttle retirement is a little too soon Stephen. Too soon.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 25 May 2010 | 9:51 am Oil Still Creeping Onto Gulf CoastsMore crude oil crept onto Gulf of Mexico shores Tuesday as energy giant BP prepared for a desperate effort to plug a massive leak that is consistently spewing more oil each day.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 25 May 2010 | 9:40 am TC Disrupt Startup Alley: Knocking Live has 1.6M users, faster growth than Foursquare, Gowalla
Pointy Heads released Knocking Live in December in collaboration with Sourcebits, and have since amassed 1.6 million downloads. They’re here at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley, among a plethora of other great companies. The app has all sorts of uses, but one crazy guy decided to strap their iPhone to an RC Airplane and stream a live feed of the view from the sky. It’s as cool as it sounds. Hit the jump for the video.
Knocking Live is the first (and only, to my knowledge) peer-to-peer video sharing. You can use it to stream a live video feed from your iPhone’s camera to another iPhone (or Android) anywhere in the world. You don’t need an iPhone 3GS, you can have a 3G. Here’s the video of streaming video from hundreds of feet up using an RC Airplane and an iPhone with Knocking Live:
Source: MobileCrunch | 25 May 2010 | 9:31 am Video: T-mobile myTouch 3G Slide unboxed in front of your very eyes
And here it is. Android Community have gotten their hands on the retail packaging for the upcoming QWERTY Android device, and I felt that it was nice enough to share with you. It comes in a metal box! I don’t know if it’s just the 10 year old in me, but I think that’s pretty cool. They also have a slew of photos of the device, including UI shots, and the included accessories. Check the video out, below! (Pro tip, stay on past the 3:30 minute mark for some merengue beats. Most suitable for this final manoeuvre!)
Source: MobileCrunch | 25 May 2010 | 8:51 am Saving Rainforests Could Help Reduce PovertyA new study shows that saving rainforests and protecting land in national parks and reserves reduced poverty in two developing countries, according to research by a Georgia State University professor.Paul J.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 25 May 2010 | 8:32 am AT&T offering free wi-fi to customers in Times Square
They’re hoping that by offloading some high-traffic areas onto wi-fi, they might unload some of the burden that’s been breaking the backs of iPhone users for the last few years. I’m not sure that it’s really going to make a dent, but hey, it’s something. If it makes a difference, they’ll probably roll it out in other major metropolitan areas, so stay tuned.
Source: MobileCrunch | 25 May 2010 | 8:30 am Parasitic Threat To Animals And The Environment RevealedResearchers at Queen's University Belfast have discovered animal populations may often be under a much larger threat from parasites than previously recognized.It is widely believed that the absence of parasites in species which 'invade' ecosystems gives these 'invaders' an advantage in their new homes (the 'enemy release hypothesis').Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 25 May 2010 | 8:28 am Upcoming ads comfirm that the iPhone HD will have video chat
Right now, filming is underway for the new iPhone commercials (directed by Sam Mendes, of American Beauty fame), and Engadget have it on good authority that one scene will feature a mother and daughter video-chatting to each other using their next-gen iPhones. Aw, how sweet. Of course, don’t expect any official confirmation before June 7th, but I think this one’s a pretty safe bet.
Source: MobileCrunch | 25 May 2010 | 8:23 am AT&T Tests Free Wi-Fi in Times Square
There’s little reason to visit Times Square in New York unless you’re a sandal’n’socks wearing, guidebook-toting tourist (or if you work there), but AT&T just made visiting the tackiest plaza in Manhattan a little bit more attractive. As of today, AT&T customers can grab free Wi-Fi when not buying helium balloons or miniature Empire State Buildings. This, we presume, is a way to improve the telco’s notoriously bad data performance in several metropolitan centers. The hotspot (singular) is located somewhere on 7th Avenue between 45th and 47th Streets. I like to think of it as being lodged between the McDonald’s golden arches and the TGI Friday’s sat next door. Once you have connected to any one of AT&T’s hot-spots, your phone should remember and flip over to any other AT&T spot whenever it encounters one. This is AT&T’s first ever free outdoor hotspot, says the Wall Street Journal, and is a trial that could make its way out of tourist hell and into three other cities, and thence possibly into the world at large: Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco would be a perfect spot. Setting up a Wi-Fi network is presumably a lot less hassle law-wise than getting permission for another cell-tower, and at least AT&T is doing something about its spotty network. It might not be an entirely fair test, though. Do the bridge-and-tunnel folks even have smartphones? AT&T Sets Up Free Wi-Fi In Times Square to Ease iPhone Load [WSJ] NYC photo: Charlie Sorrel 
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 25 May 2010 | 8:22 am 'Nature's Batteries' May Have Helped Power Early LifeformsResearchers at the University of Leeds have uncovered new clues to the origins of life on Earth.The team found that a compound known as pyrophosphite may have been an important energy source for primitive lifeforms.There are several conflicting theories of how life on Earth emerged from inanimate matter billions of years ago – a process known as abiogenesis."It's a chicken and egg question," said Dr Terry Kee of the University of Leeds, who led the research.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 25 May 2010 | 8:22 am New QC Tool For Microbial GenomesMore than a thousand microbial genomes have been sequenced at various sequencing centers in the past 15 years to better understand their roles in tasks ranging from bioenergy to health to environmental cleanup.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 25 May 2010 | 8:15 am Walmart drops price of 16GB iPhone 3GS to $97, impending iPhone HD to thank
There isn’t really much more to say on this one. If you’re looking for a cheap, functional smartphone on AT&T, you can’t really go wrong with this deal. Unless you dislike Apple of course. Or can’t handle the thought of impending obsolescence. Or whatever. I’m sure you know what you’re doing. [via Gizmodo]
Source: MobileCrunch | 25 May 2010 | 8:01 am FlipSync Crams USB Dock Cable into Key-Fob
$20 might at first seem expensive for a USB charging cable, especially as it is limited to Apple’s iDevices. But when you are down to the last few excited electrons in your iPhone’s battery and you just have to Tweet that your iPhone is sooo nearly dead, the $20 will look cheap. So go spend it on Scosche’s flipSYNC already, a keychain USB/Dock cable that folds up into a tiny plastic capsule which itself looks just like the non-key part of your car key. Crack open the case and you have yourself two plugs, ready to gulp down a little extra juice from any nearby computer or other USB-teat. For those of us not bound up in Apple’s world, there is another version which includes a standard USB connector along with both mini and micro USB plugs. This one is crazy useful, letting you connect phones, hard-drives and even cameras and card-readers to a computer for charging or data-transferring duties, and costs the same $20. If you can stomach buying replacements for things you already have, then these two adapters, snuggled together on your keyring, could be the most useful $40 you spend since that handy, tasteful Laptop Burka. FlipSYNC [Scosche] 
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 25 May 2010 | 7:09 am Google’s U.S. economic impactThis week is National Small Business Week, and Ross will be with me on Capitol Hill in Washington today to share his story and help unveil something that means a tremendous amount to me: a new report detailing, for the first time ever, Google’s economic impact in all 50 states. People think of Google first and foremost as a search engine, but it’s also an engine of economic growth. In our report, we’re announcing that in 2009 we generated a total of $54 billion of economic activity for American businesses, website publishers and non-profits. Over the years people have asked us whether we could quantify our economic impact on a state level, and we’re pleased to do that for the first time with this report, which you can download at google.com/economicimpact. In a time of tighter budgets and a slow economic recovery, we’re glad to support so many small businesses and entrepreneurs across the country by helping them find new customers more efficiently and monetize their websites through targeted advertising. Here’s a video from me and our Chief Economist, Hal Varian, with more background on where we get the numbers: The report is filled with really wonderful stories about the direct economic impact that AdWords, AdSense, Google Grants and our search engine have across the country. These are the stories of entrepreneurs across the country growing their businesses with Google. And this morning Googlers are hosting events in 10 other cities across the country (Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Oakland, Portland (OR), Raleigh and Seattle) to help share those stories. Ladies and gentlemen, start your economic engines! Posted by Claire Hughes Johnson, Vice President, Global Online Sales   
 Source: The Official Google Blog | 25 May 2010 | 7:00 am Understanding The 2002 Break-up Of The Antarctic Ozone HoleThe eruption of the volcano in Iceland has drawn attention to air flow patterns, as airlines lost millions of dollars and travelers remained stranded for days to weeks, as particles from the natural disaster traveled over Europe, forcing closures of major airports.The flow of particles, although seemingly random, can be characterized more effectively, according to work done by Virginia Tech's Shane Ross of the engineering science and mechanics (ESM) department and his colleague Francois Lekien of École Polytechnique, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, who reported their findings in the publication Chaos.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 25 May 2010 | 6:40 am Dell Streak Tablet Official, Crippled by Android 1.6
Dell’s little five-inch tablet, the Streak, has gotten official, and it will launch in the UK “early next month”. The Snapdragon 1-GHz-equipped Android slate has been Dell’s worst-kept secret for a while, but now at last it has made it (almost) into the light and revealed a rather dirty little secret: it will run the ancient Android 1.6 OS. The Streak will be available on the O2 network and sold through O2 or Carphone Warehouse, whose press release says that “Dell [has] confirmed an over-the-air Android upgrade for Streak, complete with full flash 10 support, which will be available a bit later on in the year.” Given the tardiness with which carriers apply these updates and we won’t be holding our breath for Froyo to appear on the Streak. The tablet, which unlike the iPad can actually make phone calls (if you’re willing to hold such a monster up to your ear), has a 5MP camera (with LED “flash”), a 5-inch WVGA touch screen, GPS along with 3G, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and ships with a 16GB microSD card. Despite the imminent launch, O2 has still not set a price. It’ll be very interesting to see how this does. On one hand, it is a rather large but very functional cellphone. On the other, it is a more portable alternative to the iPad that will also replace your phone. The price will be key, so stay tuned. More official pictures below. Dell Streak to launch exclusively on O2 [O2] Dell Streak: our very first tablet [Carphone Warehouse] See Also:
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 25 May 2010 | 6:17 am 7 Ways to Watch Web Video Without Google TV
Tech companies are in a race to redefine the TV experience by combining web video content with traditional programming. The goal: to control your living-room screen by creating an experience where using the remote to view BoingBoing’s latest video on your 52-inch plasma is as easy as playing the last episode of Lost from your Tivo, or clicking over to a live broadcast from Yankee Stadium. Google announced a new set-top-box platform called Google TV last week. It will be based on Google’s Android operating system and will have access to Flickr, gaming sites such as Club Penguin, and music sites such as Pandora and Rhapsody. With Google TV, the search company enters a crowded space where big companies such as Apple and Microsoft and scrappy startups such as Boxee and Roku have been trying to make headway for years. Where Google TV hopes to score is in its ability to integrate cable programming with web video. Most other alternatives only offer access to free TV channels or select cable shows. The first Google TV products, including a Sony TV running the software and a Logitech set-top box, are expected in the fall. But you don’t have to wait for that — especially if you don’t care about cable TV. Here are seven alternatives to Google TV that are already available.
BoxeeBoxee’s media player is probably the cheapest way to get a streaming-media player: It’s free. (Assuming you already have a computer, that is.) Add to that a great interface and access to some high-quality content, and Boxee is a strong competitor to Google TV. Boxee organizes content into five buckets: movies, TV shows, photos, music and apps. So from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart to Jersey Shore and Joost, neat, square-shaped icons present a lineup that’s easy to navigate on the big screen. Boxee integrates with Netflix, so it’s easy for Netflix subscribers to use Boxee to play movies instantly. It also takes music and movies from your computer’s hard drive and pours them into this interface so it can be found easily. Just download it to your PC, and hook up the machine to your TV through the HDMI port. Boxee even has an iPhone app that lets you turn your iPhone into a remote to control the software. It is available as a software-only download. Soon, you should also be able to buy a dedicated Boxee hardware box with the software preloaded. The Boxee box is made by D-Link and will be Wi-Fi enabled. It will include an ethernet-connectivity option, 2 USB ports, SD card slot, remote and a keyboard. The Boxee box is expected to be priced under $200 and available by fall. WIRED Easy to watch online video on TV, user-friendly interface and navigation, free software. TIRED Stability can still be an issue though crashes are less frequent now, playback of shows can sometimes be choppy, frequent skirmishes with Hulu. RokuRoku’s media player is targeted at those who want web content on their TV but don’t want to get their hands dirty with the setup. The Roku set-top box is the definition of plug-and-play and offers a choice of free and premium channels. Customers largely use the device to stream movies from Netflix and Amazon. It also offers some free channels include Twit.TV, and TechPodcasts.com, along with access to Flickr. But in a world where its rivals are innovating fast, Roku can be very limiting. Basic web integration is now a part of most Blu-ray players, and Netflix is available through other options such as rival Boxee for free, or the Xbox 360. Why buy a Roku player for $80? WIRED Set-top box is simple to configure and use, good HD-quality content. TIRED Limited choice of online video content, no subtitles in movies, video quality can be inconsistent. TiVoTiVo’s digital video recorders are a must-have for anyone who cannot bear to miss Monday Night Football or a single episode of FlashForward. It’s also the original digital video recorder, giving you the ability to record and watch TV when you want. While cable companies have marginalized TiVo by integrating DVR capabilities into their cable boxes, the latest version of TiVo has some unique features that make it worth a look. TiVo has updated its DVRs to lets users access on-demand video from Netflix and Amazon, or watch endless videos from YouTube. There’s also the ability to stream music and photos from online sites and transfer recorded shows to your iPod, iPhone or PSP. Of course, all this comes at a price. TiVo Premiere starts at $300 and requires an annual service fee of $130. WIRED Smooth interface that’s the hallmark of TiVo, recording capability is a must-have for TV addicts. TIRED Pricey, no Wi-Fi, no browser. Yahoo Connected TVMillions of users access Yahoo services such as news, finance and Flickr through their PCs or phones. Not surprisingly, Yahoo has been working to extend its tentacles into the TV market. Yahoo Connected TV, introduced last year, uses the concept of “widgets” to put services into boxes that can be sorted and organized by users. Apart from Yahoo’s own services, Yahoo offers widgets from Amazon, Blockbuster and broadcasters such as CBS and Showtime. Yahoo says it will let developers create widgets to run on Connected TV. Yahoo has partnered with companies such as Samsung, Sony and Vizio to put the Yahoo Connected TV software inside TV sets. So if you have one of these sets, you can take advantage of the Yahoo-enabled features. So far the company claims about 3 million TVs featuring this software have been sold since it was introduced in March 2009. But depending on TV makers could be the flaw in Yahoo’s strategy. Sony has already moved into Google’s camp, promising to offer Google TV inside some of its TV models later this year. Also, there’s no PC option. If consumers can’t download and run Yahoo Connected TV from their PCs, it’ll be difficult to sell them on the idea. After all, how will they know what they’re missing? WIRED No separate box to clutter your living room, widget-based approach is easy to use. TIRED Poor distribution; no browser, so you can’t go where you want. Microsoft Windows Media CenterThe Windows media player has been around so far and gone through so many iterations that it’s easy to forget that Microsoft was the first major tech company to see the potential of getting into the living room. Media player offers access to TV shows, music and movie trailers. But Windows Media Center is the company’s real deal for the living room. Media Center lets your PC act as a DVR if you have a tuner card, listen to FM and internet radio stations, watch photos from your disk and even connect with Netflix on the big screen. And you can sync all your content with a Windows phone or a Zune if you use the Media Center. Microsoft’s counting on its biggest strength to bring Windows Media Center to PC users: the Windows operating system. The program is included in Windows XP Media Center Edition, premium editions of Windows Vista and Windows 7. But there’s one big thing missing: the cool factor. And Media Center hasn’t inked partnerships or aggregated TV content to the extent that an Apple TV or a Boxee can offer. WIRED Available with most versions of Windows OS, so no additional software downloads. TIRED User interface isn’t sleek, very limited TV content. Apple TVApple has been seemingly firing on all cylinders for the last few years. Apple TV, introduced in 2007, is a rare flop. The digital media receiver never reached the ubiquity of an iPod, nor did it become the gold standard for its category like the iPhone. At $230, Apple TV isn’t cheap. But it lets users watch HD movies and TV shows through deals that Apple has struck with the studios. You have to pay to buy or rent most shows, but you can view YouTube content for free. Despite its early lead, Apple TV falls far short in what users get for the price. Apple’s closed system means users are locked into iTunes to purchase movies. So if you want to run Netflix or Amazon video, you have to get Boxee on your Apple TV, which we think raises the question: Why not just get Boxee? WIRED Great interface that blows away competition, beautiful integration with iTunes, good shows and movies for a price. TIRED Back to iTunes for managing content, no direct access to Hulu, Netflix, not a dream Apple product. Netgear Digital EntertainerStreaming video players are so hot that even Netgear, otherwise known for its modems and routers, put out a box called Digital Entertainer. Netgear’s internet-TV-player box makes online video, photos and music accessible through the TV, even for those who don’t have a PC. The player connects to the home network and the internet by ethernet or wireless USB adapater. The box includes upto 500 GB of storage for movies, music and photos. But the streaming media player at Netgear may be even more of a hobby than at Apple. The company offers two versions of its box, priced at $100 and a whopping $400, and neither has exactly taken the market by storm. WIRED Feature-rich, record and play TV shows if your PC has a TV tuner, works without the need to hook up a PC. TIRED Ugly box, buggy, interface is a nightmare, pricey. Updated to include Windows Media Center instead of Windows Media Player Photo: Niall Kennedy/Flickr 
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 25 May 2010 | 6:00 am 7 Ways to Watch Web Video Without Google TVCan't wait for Google TV? Here are seven alternatives that you can use to watch web videos, TV shows and photos from your computer, right on the big screen in your living room.
Source: Wired: Gadgets | 25 May 2010 | 6:00 am Arthritis-Busting Clothespin is Ingenious and Complex
You know when you first wake up in the morning and you’re as weak as a kitten? You try to pick up something small and heavy, but you just can’t grip it. Imagine being like that all the time, only with added pain. That’s arthritis. Arthritis makes everyday tasks a chore, and we have featured several helpful widgets designed to make life easier for those with gnarled knuckles. This redesigned clothespin, designed by a gentleman only known as Product Tank, wins for being both the most mechanically fascinating, and because it adds many layers of complexity to what is one of the simplest products you can buy. The peg combines levers, weak springs and a clever rubber-ratcheting jaw to make it both easy to squeeze open and secure in its grip. Squeezing it, like you’d squeeze a hand-grenade before throwing, opens the jaws and lets you slip it over the damp clothes and washing-line. When you let go, the ratchet drops over the front handle and keeps it in place, and the spring pushes it forward as far as it will go. If the pin slips then the rubber grip will push the clamp further closed. But no matter how tight it gets, a light squeeze on the rear handle will pop it open and relieve the pressure. It sure is ingenious but, like I said, it is also way more complex. Then again, even tripling the price of a pack of clothespins is still cheap. Product Tank tried out an array of prototypes on his arthritic neighbor Shirley before arriving at this final design. Here’s hoping that this one makes it out of Shirley’s back yard and into stores. Video below (skip to two minutes in). Clothes Peg [Product Tank via Core 77] See Also:
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 25 May 2010 | 5:20 am Wal-Mart Cuts 16GB iPhone 3GS to Under $100
There are two ways to read this, both of which presume a new iPhone announcement at the Jobsnote on June 7th. One is that Wal-Mart has lots of excess inventory it wants to shift before the iPhone 4G kills sales. The second, and more likely, is that the 3GS will take the place of the 8GB 3G as the entry-level iPhone for the next year. In this latter case, Wal-Mart would simply be the first to jump, and the first 3G iPhone would be no more. Apple needs a $99 iPhone to hit the magic impulse-purchase price-point, the same reason the iPod Touch starts off at $199 (and features slower hardware and less memory to get it in under $200). The likelihood of it keeping an old model into its third year, and having a confusing lineup of three different handsets is very un-Apple. So if you’re planning on grabbing a cheap iPhone, and don’t care for anything new that might come in June, head to Wal-Mart. Or just wait until it costs $100 everywhere. Wal-Mart slashes iPhone price to $97 [CNN] iPhone product page [Wal-Mart] See Also:
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 25 May 2010 | 4:08 am
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You can fit eight Jammie Dodgers into a single-occupancy Leicester Square hotel room. Provided that they don't all try to breathe in at once. We breathe in shifts.
People are constantly walking through the streets of Times Square causing an overload on the cell phone data networks within the area. Especially on New Year’s, it is probably impossible to send or receive any data because of the inordinate amount of people taking advantage of the network. Now, instead of upgrading or installing new cell phone towers to the vicinity, AT&T has decided to take a different route. A free WiFi hot spot zone has been launched near 7th Avenue between 45th and 47th Street. It is designed to provide an alternative and faster means of transferring data in such a congested area. 
In keeping with the Palm deals today, we can also share a link to Best Buy who is currently offering the Touchstone charging dock at a nicely discounted $19.99.
Interesting. Despite all the brouhaha about 
Remember that 
This morning at TechCrunch Disrupt, AOL cofounder 
That quote in the title is completely from 
Now more than ever, marketers are using tools to monitor and keep track of the conversation about brands taking place on sites like Facebook and Twitter. While many of these tools monitor sentiment around Tweets and updates including a brand’s name, 
I’ll admit that I know nothing about fine art. It actually somewhat interests me as an idea, but I’m never going to go to a gallery. Basically, everything I do is now online. But finding fine art online seems hard. A quick Google 
Everyone loves movie clips. But, unfortunately, they’re often hard to find online in one centralized place. There’s a simple reason for this: licensing. If someone could just solve that, they’d have a pretty killer website, right? That’s what 
Apple has hired American Beauty director Sam Mendes to shoot TV ads for the next-generation iPhone, according to a rumor posted by tech blog Engadget.
Motorola’s Droid phone has been a big hit for the company — and if you are wondering what’s next, say hello to Shadow, the codename for the successor to the Droid.
As far as the New York Yankees are concerned, the iPad has struck out. The team, one of the best ever in major league baseball, has banned Apple’s red hot tablet from Yankee Stadium. Security officials at the ballpark say the device falls under their no laptops policy. Presumably the policy is in place to keep fans from using their webcams to stream the games over the net, but honestly, what true baseball fan would want to talk their laptop or iPad to a ballgame? Never mind the high risk of damage from spilled food and drink and overly enthusiastic fans, but considering how much a ticket to a game costs these days, don’t you want to catch every moment and get your money’s worth? Seriously, it’s okay to leave the iPad, netbook, or laptop alone at home for a few hours. It’ll wait patiently for your return. Trust me.
Like the camera sitting on the face of 
Today, Wal-Mart cut the price of the 16GB iPhone 3GS to $97, less than half its normal price. In case you’re still on your first coffee of the day, that the the 3GS, not the already discounted 3G.
