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India’s Reliance Sells off Cellular Towers (PC World)PC World - India's second largest mobile operator, Reliance Communications, said on Sunday that it has entered into an agreement to sell its cellular towers business to GTL Infrastructure, a large Indian company specialized in providing shared tower and other infrastructure services to mobile operators.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 28 Jun 2010 | 8:40 am Bettween Makes Tracking And Sharing Twitter Conversations Even Easier
Twitter recently launched a tool called Blackbird Pie that enables anyone to easily embed single tweets on their blogs and websites. But it doesn’t offer a solution for tracking or sharing conversations between Twitter users. Enter Bettween, which does just that, stylishly. We’ve covered the first version of the web app, which made it easy to visualize what is being said between two specific Twitter users (e.g. @aplusk and @mrskutcher), but a recent update brings more goodies. Aside from a fresh UI, you can now limit the visualized Twitter back-and-forth with a start and end point in time, making it easier for people to see and share messages that they care most about. Also new is the ability to sort tweets in ascending or descending order.
The biggest change, however, is the fact that you can now embed Twitter conversation on your own site, with the ability to customize the widget to match its look and feel.
It only takes a couple of clicks, but of course you need to find people who’ve actually conversed with each other on Twitter. Unlike these two:
     
Source: TechCrunch | 28 Jun 2010 | 4:06 am Microsoft's Ryan Moore - Computerandvideogames.com
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 28 Jun 2010 | 4:05 am Verizon Wireless nabs Samsung Fascinate; T-Mobile gets Vibrant (updated) - ZDNet (blog)
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 28 Jun 2010 | 3:45 am Southpaws up in arms over iPhone 4 - Register
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 28 Jun 2010 | 3:43 am Brits Insulted By Steve Jobs’ Response To iPhone 4 Reception Issue Remember Steve Jobs' advice regarding the iPhone 4's reported reception issues - it's all your fault - relayed via an alleged email response from the Apple CEO himself (yes, one of those emails). Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, it hasn't got down well with UK early adopters of the company's latest smartphone.
That's according to a rather opportunistic "flash" survey from rightmobilephone, which found that 63% of respondents were "particularly angered" by Jobs’ email in which he told one early iPhone 4 adopter to "avoid holding [the phone] in that way".
The mobile phone comparison website polled 836 iPhone 4 users, 93% of whom claimed to have already been affected by a loss of signal whilst gripping the handset to make calls, whilst 78% of owners dubbed the fault "an insult".
Source: TechCrunch | 28 Jun 2010 | 3:18 am UPDATE 2-Novartis needs Alcon directors' OK for buyout -advisor* Legal expert says Alcon board needs support of directorsSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Jun 2010 | 3:07 am White House launches plan to boost broadband - Reuters
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 28 Jun 2010 | 3:03 am UPDATE 2-Japan's Idemitsu sees Q3 crude refining down 2 pct* Refining for domestic market drops 4 pct to 6.2 mln klSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Jun 2010 | 2:53 am AstraZeneca signs malaria drug research agreementLONDON, June 28 (Reuters) - Anglo-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca said it was opening up around 500,000 of its chemical compounds to the Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) to help speed up development...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Jun 2010 | 2:48 am EURO BONDS-Neste Oil, HSH NordbankLONDON, June 28 (Reuters) - News, details on corporate bond issues in the European markets on Monday:Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Jun 2010 | 2:35 am Viral Video: Conflict-Free Technology Vs. Blood Phones [BoomTown]
The interest in the controversy around minerals from the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, which are used in a variety of popular consumer tech devices, seems to be getting another round of much-needed attention. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, for example, penned a piece titled “Death by Gadget” this past weekend, with the opening line: “‘Blood diamonds’ have faded away, but we may now be carrying ‘blood phones.’” It was prompted by new grassroots efforts by activists to revive the issue again, including the new video below, titled: “I’m a Mac…and I’ve Got a Dirty Little Secret.” The goal: To get big tech companies–such as Apple (AAPL) and Intel (INTC)–to promise to monitor the sourcing of the minerals they use in their devices, such as smartphones. It’s worth a look, but you might also want to watch this full video of a gripping interview I did in 2009 at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference on this very topic with activist Eve Ensler, who has be tireless in her efforts to shed light on the madness in the troubled African nation and link the carnage there to consumer behavior here. [ See post to watch video ] Source: All Things Digital | 28 Jun 2010 | 2:31 am UPDATE 1-Creston agrees to sell ad agency DLKW to IPGJune 28 (Reuters) - British communications firm Creston Plc said it agreed to sell its advertising agency DLKW Group to the world's No. 4 ad group Interpublic Group of Cos Inc for 28 million pounds.Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Jun 2010 | 2:23 am Trusty Gadget Cleansers - The Droid Soap Bar Beats Any Technology in Staying Clean (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) The existence of the Droid Soap Bar has fed into my obsession with interestingly-shaped soaps. Looking like a realistic techie gadget, this phone-shaped piece is actually a Kahlua Cafe...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Jun 2010 | 2:20 am Best Phone For a Wi-Fi-Only Location?bendodge writes "I am planning on heading to a university in a remote area with very poor cellular service (the only signal is spotty Verizon voice, no data). However, the entire campus is thoroughly blanketed in Wi-Fi. I am trying to find the best and most economical 'Wi-Fi phone' or else hack one together. Belkin/Netgear sell what is essentially a portable Skype device for $180. These folks recommend outfitting an iPod Touch with a mic and VoIP apps. I am looking for something that can make and receive calls to and from landlines with incoming call notification. What experiences have Slashdot readers had and what would you recommend?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 28 Jun 2010 | 2:14 am UPDATE 1-France Tel drops out of Le Monde's race* France Telecom, Nouvel Obs to withdraw bid post meeting.Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Jun 2010 | 2:09 am Pocket KiteI've collected quite an assortment of logo emblazoned pens, mousepads, stress balls, and other tchotchkes at professional conferences, but far and away the most fun and useful (as in, it gets...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Jun 2010 | 2:05 am Clashing Pixelated Portraits - Agata Nowicka's Artwork of Bittersweet Contradictions (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) Agata Nowicka is very sure about her own work; she hopes that it evokes a bittersweet emotion while simultaneously stretching the contradictions of existence. The Polish graphic designer...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Jun 2010 | 2:00 am Bank of Brazil Selects Autonomy's Meaning Based Computing PlatformSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Jun 2010 | 2:00 am How to Scope Someone Out Online (PC World)PC World - By the time my roommate, Sarah, invited a strange man from Australia to stay with us for a month, he no longer seemed like a stranger to her.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 28 Jun 2010 | 2:00 am Ness Technologies Wins $2.6 Million Outsourcing Extension Contract with Israel's Ministry of Environmental ProtectionSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Jun 2010 | 1:57 am MTS Wins 2010 Meffys Mobile Entertainment Award for Omlet.ru Content PortalSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Jun 2010 | 1:57 am BRIEF-Statoil in $437 mln deal with Stena DrillingOSLO, June 28 (Reuters) - Norwegian oil and gas group Statoil said:Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Jun 2010 | 1:37 am How RIM Can Bring the Sexy Back to BlackBerry: A Five-Point Marketing Plan
Editor’s note: In the following guest post, PR consultant Vijay Chattha of VSC/AppLaunchPR gives some unsolicited marketing advice to Research in Motion. Another profitable quarter and another hit to RIM’s stock price. People are buying Blackberries, but investors are not buying RIM. Why? Short answer. No buzz. Despite continuing to reign supreme as America’s smartphone of choice, RIM’s Blackberry devices are not creating enough excitement in the market. Sure, RIM saw 20 percent profit growth in the first quarter of 2010, but they’ve also watched their market share dwindle as rivals Apple and Android grow. If there was ever a time for a change, it’s now. BlackBerry, which is still ranked ahead of the iPhone and Android in worldwide popularity, can’t keep telling the market its working on an iPhone-killer that remains in the distant horizon. It needs a business makeover. As a branding and PR executive, I’ve taken some of the planning process around our work with mobile startups and applied it to RIM with five ways the Canadian company can boost their hopes and bring sexy back to Blackberry. (They can thank me later). 1. Leverage Obama How? Make a ‘Barackberry’ version. Bullet-proof, global data roaming and super secure, just like Barack’s berry. It could become the ‘must-have’ tech toy from D.C. to Dubai. RIM should charge $10,000 so that all the hedge fund types buy in as well. Barackberrys should be given out at uber-influencer events such as TED, Davos and young exec confabs like the Summit Series. 2. Launch your Silicon Valley-based presence. Go big or go back to Canada. 3. Buy Hollywood
Own a movie. A good one to start with would have been Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Come on. Every banker has a Blackberry. What better device to use to bring down the global economy than a BB Bold? Gordon Gecko has Blackberry written all over him. And he needs an upgrade from the brick he used in the original movie. While you’re on Sunset Avenue, revamp your TV ads which feature the Beatles and U2. Ask yourself what you are selling? Mobile phones or Flomax? While BlackBerry is spending millions for the rights to “All You Need is Love,” Apple is being pitched by labels and bands, many of whom want nothing in return but the free promotion of having their music featured in TV ads. After Feist’s ‘1-2-3-4’ appeared in an Apple iPod nano commercial, sales of her song spiked 586 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Instead of breaking the bank, BlackBerry could be breaking new bands. 4. Scrap your apps. Beyond technical issues, RIM needs to change its developer payouts. Recent projections show Apple’s profit from apps may only equal 1 percent of total profits. It’s only promoting apps to sell hardware. Period. If that’s the case, then why should BlackBerry even worry about making money from apps? Apps should be a loss leader. Blackberry apps should give 100 percent of the revenue to developers and even go one better. Instead of U2, focus more TV ads around your hot apps and their developers. Make them the rockstars. Oh yeah, and where’s RIM’s own mobile ad network? Now that’s really the hottest accessory for 2010. Google has one, so does Apple. RIM announced a strategy to work with multiple networks and no one listened. Perhaps something more strategic is necessary to help developers market and distribute their apps. 5. Focus on an iTunes-killer, not an iPhone-killer First, purchase a music subscription service like Spotify or Rdio. Blackberry users want music but can’t find anything within the device. RIM should seize this opportunity. Music and apps are only two customer billing entry points. RIM may want to consider strategic M&A to broaden its credit card database. RIM reminds me of a line from the movie Swingers: “You’re money and you don’t even know it.” RIM is well positioned from a cash and market share perspective to make BlackBerry a global, mobile, must-have addiction, but the company needs to make bold moves now or risk becoming Nokia.      
Source: TechCrunch | 28 Jun 2010 | 1:31 am Space Boot Court Kicks - The Nike Air Force 1 Foamposite is Made Out of One Piece (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) The Nike Air Force 1 Foamposite takes the age-old craft of shoe making and turns the whole process on its head. Rather than using several different pieces to make one shoe, this bad...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Jun 2010 | 1:30 am The Mobile Web Lights Up Between 8 PM And Midnight
Opera has released its latest State of the Mobile Web report, and once again it has registered reasonable growth, with Opera Mini users increasing by 4.2% compared to April 2010. Since that month, page views have also gone up 7.7%, Opera says. For this report, Opera analyzed one 24-hour period to see how Opera Mini is used throughout the day in the top 10 countries (Indonesia, Russia, India, China, Nigeria, Ukraine, South Africa, the United States, Vietnam and the United Kingdom). Turns out that for all of those, regardless of differences in economy, culture or location, the four hours between 8 PM and midnight apparently account for a disproportionate amount of mobile data consumption. Opera found that during said 24-hour period, the highest level of Opera Mini use is at nighttime, from 8 PM to midnight with little difference in data consumption between weekdays and weekends, in all of the top 10 countries. Curiously, users in the UK appear to be just as likely to browse on their phones between 8 AM and noon. Other fun tidbits from the report: - Night owls: compared to users in the other top 10 countries, users in the United States are more likely to be browsing with Opera Mini between midnight and 4 AM. - Early risers: compared to users in the other top 10 countries, users in the UK are more likely to be browsing between 4 AM and noon. - In general, evening browsing (between 4 PM and midnight) is more common than daytime browsing (between 8 AM and 4 PM), except in China and the UK where daytime/evening usage is about even. Is this consistent with your mobile browsing habits, considering you’re in either one of the top 10 countries?      
Source: TechCrunch | 28 Jun 2010 | 1:22 am Musical Tanning Towels - The Hi-Sun Beach Towel Has Speakers for iPhones and iPods (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) The Hi-Sun Beach Towel lets you listen to your music while you get a nice tan. Sure, you can bring your iPod or iPhone and stuff headphones in your ears, but that poses a problem if...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Jun 2010 | 1:10 am Clay Shirky's "Cognitive Surplus": Is Creating And Sharing Always a More Moral Choice Than Consuming? [Voices]By Megan Garber, Assistant Editor, Nieman Journalism Lab In 1998, People magazine, trying to figure out how to use this new-ish tool called the World Wide Web, launched a poll asking readers to vote for People.com’s Most Beautiful Person of the year. There were the obvious contenders — Kate Winslet, Leonardo diCaprio — and then, thanks to a Howard Stern fan named Kevin Renzulli, a write-in candidate emerged: Henry Joseph Nasiff, Jr., better known as Hank, the Angry Drunken Dwarf. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 28 Jun 2010 | 1:04 am Elevation Invests Another $120 Million in Facebook as that IPO Looks More Distant
That November deal has already gone up 2.5 times in value in a short eight months, making Facebook one of the better performing deals in Elevation’s portfolio and an enviable holding for any firm. Even though the bulk of Elevation’s Facebook shares were purchased at the more recent price, if you blend the two deals, there’s still an on-paper gain. Blended together, Elevation’s 7.5 million shares were purchased at a $14 billion valuation, and Facebook is trading at upwards of $24 billion on the secondary market today. Sure, the appreciation looks good, but a lot of people– including us when we first broke the story– have alleged that these deals are ones any hedge fund could do. That’s not actually true, according to several sources close to the deal.
Elevation’s premature obituary is a popular story these days. Things haven’t worked out as planned for the firm—at all— but that’s not unique in the venture market these days, and the tide is turning for Elevation. The Palm-albatross is gone, and the firm didn’t lose money on the deal—not a trivial milestone considering it was 20% of the fund. (Photo above from the good old Elevation days.) Today, Elevation is clearly switching strategies. Ambitious ideas of remaking the media business and investing huge percentages of a fund in revamping legacy companies are gone. The fund has more than $100 million left to invest, and that money likely won’t go into another Palm or Forbes, but another Yelp or Facebook. These mature Web 2.0 companies have far more assured success, the question is how much of a multiple late-stage investors like Elevation can make. As an added plus, these type of deals don’t take anywhere near the hand-holding and work that the big ambitious, swing-for-the-fences turnarounds required. That was likely the real reason Elevation was laying off support staff last week, not necessarily an indication of the firm’s health. Elevation is simply becoming a different firm. And Elevation is playing a new role for the Web 2.0 ecosystem too—staving off the dreaded IPO. Rumors of a Facebook IPO have swirled since at least 2007, despite Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s long time apprehension to rush into the world of short-term traders and activist hedge funds. There are a few good reasons for a company to go public. An IPO can net a company a lot of cash, allow employees to get liquidity on their shares, and give a privately-held company a frequently-priced stock currency it can use for acquisitions. But Facebook has managed to do a lot of that with the secondary market, and it can still control who buys its stock. That’s a template that only the highest valued Web 2.0 companies can follow, and if Elevation can raise a second fund, it’ll aim to compete with firms like DST to scoop up the best ones. Information provided by CrunchBase Information provided by CrunchBase Information provided by CrunchBase      
Source: TechCrunch | 28 Jun 2010 | 1:04 am Magazine Writers Are Slow to Take Up Multimedia [Voices]By Susan Currie Sivek, Asst. Professor of Mass Communication and Journalism, Fresno State An ideal pitch for a magazine story today would seem to require great possibilities for text and for multimedia. Freelance magazine writers, one would think, would be honing their multimedia skills so they could pitch well-rounded stories to editors who could feature them in print, on the web and on an iPad or mobile device. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 28 Jun 2010 | 1:03 am An Empire Gives Way [Voices]By The Economist Online archaeology can yield surprising results. When John Kelly of Morningside Analytics, a market-research firm, recently pored over data from websites in Indonesia he discovered a “vast field of dead blogs”. Numbering several thousand, they had not been updated since May 2009. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 28 Jun 2010 | 1:02 am David Weigel Resigns Because Old Media Can't Have Nice Things [Voices]By Alex Pareene, Blogger, War Room, Salon Conservative movement journalist and blogger David Weigel just resigned from the Washington Post, following an apparently coordinated campaign to humiliate and discredit him by forwarding and posting his private messages to a listserv to unfriendly media outlets. I’m reasonably sure Weigel quit — as far as I know, he wasn’t fired or forced out — but it’s still an embarrassment for journalism as a whole. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 28 Jun 2010 | 1:01 am FleeHarmony.com [Voices]By Paul Smalera, Senior Editor, Fortune.com How many marriages per day do Internet dating Web sites generate? If that sounds like a simple question to answer, it is not. Last year the Wall Street Journal tried to cut through the hype and found, unsurprisingly, the claims put forth by major players like eHarmony, match.com, and Plenty of Fish were dubious at best. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 28 Jun 2010 | 1:01 am Hon Hai Hands Over Management of Staff Dorms [Voices]By Alex Pevzner, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. said late Friday it agreed to hand over the management of staff dormitories in China’s Shenzhen, where it employs nearly 450,000 workers, to two property management firms as it seeks to improve employee conditions where several employee suicides occurred recently. Hon Hai, also known under the trade name Foxconn Technology, signed a memorandum of understanding with two China-based commercial property management companies, Shenzhen CPM Property Management Co., and Kaiyuan Property Management, to take over management of Foxconn’s 153 employee dormitories that are linked with the company’s Longhua and Guanlan campuses outside Shenzhen, Hon Hai said in a statement. “Providing employees with basic necessities including a safe and convenient place to live at the work-site might have been sufficient in the past, but this arrangement no longer satisfies the needs of the young migrant workers of today,” Foxconn Corporate Executive Vice President Terry Cheng said in the statement. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 28 Jun 2010 | 1:00 am CrunchGear Week in Review: Food Train Edition
Bionic cat!
Source: CrunchGear | 28 Jun 2010 | 1:00 am Diet Scale Suggests What You Should Eat Instead Of Telling You What You WeighBy Andrew Liszewski The Diet Scale was designed by Ji Lee a few years ago while he was a student, and the idea is pretty simple. Instead of showing you your weight, it makes a suggestion on what you should...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Jun 2010 | 12:52 am Seafarer Menswear - Nautical Gets a Second Look in Junya Watanabe Spring 2011 Collection (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) The Junya Watanabe Spring 2011 collection was all about being nautically appropriate. Even down to the wet-looking hair, the seaside aesthetic was held down by horizontal stripes, boat...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Jun 2010 | 12:50 am iBox Sound Enhancing iPad StandBy Andrew Liszewski If there ever was a reason to learn how to use power tools and/or visit your local Home Depot, here it is. Now I’m not saying the $25 that Etsy seller ‘madebycosmo‘...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Jun 2010 | 12:39 am Last Week in New World Notes of Second Life (And Yet *Another* Wild Week it Was)The latest news in Linden Lab's corporate tumult: June 22: In Wake of Linden Lab Layoffs, Founder Acknowledges Company Overreach, Asks Second Life Users' "Forgiveness" June 24: Breaking News: Kingdon Out,...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Jun 2010 | 12:21 am UK Video Game Tax Cuts Sabotaged?ninjacheeseburger writes "Develop recently published an article claiming that the UK government was put under pressure by one of the biggest game companies in the world to cancel planned tax breaks for video game developers. This company had apparently viewed game tax relief as a measure that would have given the UK an unfair advantage over other nations."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 28 Jun 2010 | 12:20 am Vibrant Cosmetic Sculptures - The Laurel Roth 'Peacocks' Exhibit Features Gorgeous Nail Art (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) The Laurel Roth 'Peacocks' exhibit features some gorgeous works made of aesthetic accessories many use in their everyday lives. Making use of materials like fake nails, fake eyelashes,...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Jun 2010 | 12:19 am Foxconn Unveils Latest Suicide Prevention Gambit (PC World)PC World - Foxconn, the Taiwanese assembler of iPhones and other gadgets for many major electronics companies, has signed an agreement to turn over management of dorms used to house workers at massive factory campuses in Shenzhen, China, to two Chinese firms, it said Sunday.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 28 Jun 2010 | 12:10 am Amazon Introduces A Video/Audio Kindle . . . But Only On The iPad And iPhone
Amazon just introduced a audio and video to the Kindle, but the only way to experience the new Kindle multimedia books is on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. A baker’s dozen of titles already come in multimedia editions, including Rick Steves’ travel guides, Best of the Beatles For Acoustic Guitar, and Bird Songs: 250 North American Birds In Song. Adding music or narration to digital editions of books is fairly straightforward, and given the popularity of audio books, being able to both read and hear a book should be popular for some genres. Video can work also, but I suspect that more often than not it will be treated as something to be tacked on at the end rather than as an integral part of the original work. I guess it depends on who picks the videos: the author, or the publishing company’s marketing department. Trial and error will determine whether people really want video with their books. In any case, the Vook now has competition. The big takeaway here, however, is not that Amazon is making it easier for people who buy books to be distracted by something other than reading. It is that they are adding these features to the Kindle software which runs on Apple products rather than on its own more technically limited, black-and-white device. Amazon’s own Kindle reader supports text-to-speech and regular audio books, but not video. With this release, Amazon is expanding the digital audio books to the iPad and iPhone. But the Kindle apps on Apple devices adds a feature you cannot get on Kindle’s own device in terms of video. In other words, if you want that extra feature, Amazon is basically telling you to buy an iPad. Of course, it would help if the dozen or so Kindle books that come with the extra audio or video were more of the must-read or must-hear variety.      
Source: TechCrunch | 28 Jun 2010 | 12:00 am Verizon hops on the Galaxy S train with the Samsung Fascinate
Oh, you thought Verizon would let AT&T , Sprint, and T-Mobile all nab their own variants of the Android-powered Samsung Galaxy S without them getting one too? Not a chance. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>
Source: CrunchGear | 27 Jun 2010 | 11:38 pm Sprint announces their QWERTY-ified version of the Galaxy S, the Samsung Epic 4G
Remember the Galaxy Pro? It popped up around the rumor mill almost immediately after the Galaxy S was announced, and was supposedly a nearly identical phone, with one major difference: a big ol’ full QWERTY physical keyboard. It disappeared for some time after its first leak, only to make another appearance last week. And now.. it’s real. It’s oh, oh-so-real. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>
Source: CrunchGear | 27 Jun 2010 | 11:38 pm T-Mobile makes their Galaxy S variant, the Samsung Vibrant, official
We already knew a good amount about T-mobile’s variant of the Android-powered Galaxy S superphone. We knew about its 4″ AMOLED screen; we knew about its 1 Ghz processor. We knew about the 5 megapixel camera (with HD video recording!), and its 16GB of internal memory. We even knew about the $199 price tag and July 21st launch date. What we didn’t know: when it’d be announced. Turns out, that’s tonight. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>
Source: CrunchGear | 27 Jun 2010 | 11:38 pm Verizon hops on the Galaxy S train with the Samsung Fascinate
Oh, you thought Verizon would let AT&T , Sprint, and T-Mobile all nab their own variants of the Android-powered Samsung Galaxy S without them getting one too? Not a chance.
The specs are in line with all of the rest of the variant’s: 1 GHZ CPU, 5 Megapixel camera (with LED flash and HD video recording), Android 2.1, and the works like Bluetooth and WiFi all jammed behind 4″ Super AMOLED display. Alas, unlike Sprint’s Samsung Epic, there’s no physical QWERTY keyboard – but that aside, it’s still one killer piece of kit. Note: There’s no picture of Verizon’s variant available yet, so the handset shown above is the standard Galaxy S.
Source: MobileCrunch | 27 Jun 2010 | 11:21 pm T-Mobile makes their Galaxy S variant, the Samsung Vibrant, official
We already knew a good amount about T-mobile’s variant of the Android-powered Galaxy S superphone. We knew about its 4″ AMOLED screen; we knew about its 1 Ghz processor. We knew about the 5 megapixel camera (with HD video recording!), and its 16GB of internal memory. We even knew about the $199 price tag and July 21st launch date. What we didn’t know: when it’d be announced. Turns out, that’s tonight. T-Mobile just made this thing official, announcing that it’ll come preloaded with Sims 3 and a full copy of Avatar preloaded onto the 2GB microSD card. If you’re itchin’ for more info as soon as T-mo’s got it, you can sign up for notifications on their preview page right here.
Source: MobileCrunch | 27 Jun 2010 | 11:16 pm Sprint announces their QWERTY-ified version of the Galaxy S, the Samsung Epic 4G
Remember the Galaxy Pro? It popped up around the rumor mill almost immediately after the Galaxy S was announced, and was supposedly a nearly identical phone, with one major difference: a big ol’ full QWERTY physical keyboard. It disappeared for some time after its first leak, only to make another appearance last week. And now.. it’s real. It’s oh, oh-so-real.
Samsung and Sprint just pulled back the curtains minutes ago. They’re not spilling the beans on price or a launch date just yet, but the specs are enough to keep me patient:
Oh, and of course, that monstrous (and I mean that in the best sense) QWERTY keyboard. Look out, EVO 4G.
Source: MobileCrunch | 27 Jun 2010 | 11:06 pm ISTE President Helen Padgett Points to a New Frontier in Education Technology at ISTE 2010DENVER, June 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Helen Padgett, president of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE®), summoned Colorado's legacy of exploration and encouraged educators to chart a new frontier of excellence in education.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Jun 2010 | 11:03 pm Will the iPad Undercut Digital Readers? - New York Times
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 27 Jun 2010 | 10:54 pm Blancco Secures Smartphones for Reuse or Disposal with Data Erasure Software for Mobile DevicesJOENSUU, Finland, June 28, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- With recent surveys showing that the vast majority of smartphones are used for both business and personal tasks,[1,2] Blancco, the global leader in data erasure and end-of-lifecycle solutions, has today introduced Blancco Mobile Edition.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Jun 2010 | 10:52 pm Kahn Academy Delivers 100,000 Lectures Dailyeldavojohn writes "Working from the comfort of his home, Salman Kahn has made available over fifteen hundred mini-lectures to educate the world. Subjects range from math and physics to finance, biology, and current economics. Kahn Academy amounts to little more than a YouTube channel and one very, very devoted man. He is trying to provide education in the way he wished he had been taught. With over 100,000 video views a day, the man is definitely making a measurable difference for many students young and old. In his FAQ he explains how he knows he is being effective. What will probably ensure his popularity (and provide a legacy surpassing that of the most highly-paid educators) is that everything is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0. He only needs his time, a $200 Camtasia Recorder, an $80 Wacom Bamboo Tablet, and a free copy of SmoothDraw3. While the lecturing may not be quite up to the Feynman level, it's a great augmenter for advanced learners, and a lifeline for those without much access to learning resources."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 27 Jun 2010 | 10:23 pm Gov't plans to double available wireless spectrum (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 27 Jun 2010 | 10:22 pm Shoppertunity.com Reveals 'What's Good in the Hood' for PhiladelphiansPHILADELPHIA, June 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Dexter Means, Founder and CEO of Shoppertunity.com has devised a site that features an unbeatable daily deal on great stuff to do in Philadelphia. "What's good in the hood" is the apt slogan of shoppertunity.com, a bulk-buying website based in Philadelphia, PA.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Jun 2010 | 10:01 pm Strategic Defaults Remain High, but Relief May Be in SightCOSTA MESA, Calif.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Jun 2010 | 10:01 pm 10 Stellar iPad Apps That Will Blow You AwayThe iPad is now almost three months old, and the apps keep getting better. Here's a list of outstanding gems.
Source: Wired: Gadgets | 27 Jun 2010 | 10:00 pm June 28, 1846: Parisian Inventor Patents SaxophoneAdolphe Sax's new instrument enjoys nearly a century of popularity with military bands and vaudeville combos, before it finally catches on with jazz musicians.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 27 Jun 2010 | 10:00 pm 10 Stellar iPad Apps That Will Blow You AwayThe iPad is now almost three months old, and the apps keep getting better. Here's a list of outstanding gems.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 27 Jun 2010 | 10:00 pm Porting Lemmings In 36 HoursAn anonymous reader writes "Aaron Ardiri challenged himself to port his classic PalmOS version of Lemmings to the iPhone, Palm Pre, Mac and Windows. The porting was done using his own dev environment, which creates native C versions of the game. He liveblogged the whole thing, and finished after only 36 hours with an iPhone version and a Palm Pre version awaiting submission, and free versions for Windows and Mac available on his site."
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Source: Slashdot | 27 Jun 2010 | 9:26 pm Just a mellow afternoon at the G20Riot police charge and strike at peaceful protesters at the G20 Summit in Toronto, Canada. The Guardian and other news outlets report that Canada spent a billion dollars on security for the event (by comparison, London last year spent some $30 million). (via Matt Forsythe). Many more videos are here at blogto.com.
Below, a riot policeman shoots a woman at near point-blank range with a
More: here's a photograph of police taking down two photographers who work for the National Post.
Toronto 680News reporter Kevin Misener describes his experience with riot police in this radio interview (thanks, Ray Pride).
 Source: Boing Boing | 27 Jun 2010 | 9:22 pm For $1.99, a (Legal) Song to Add to YouTube Videos - New York Times
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 27 Jun 2010 | 8:50 pm 10 Stellar iPad Apps That Will Blow You Away - Wired News
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 27 Jun 2010 | 8:04 pm 10 Stellar iPad Apps That Will Blow You Away<< previous image | next image >>
The iPad is less than three months old, and already programmers have whipped up 9,000 apps for the fancy tablet. But, just as with the iPhone, there’s a problem: It’s hard to navigate the App Store for quality wares because it’s just too crowded. Right before the iPad launched and after it came out, we rounded up some apps we found intriguing. After diving into this media-savvy device, we’ve added a few more apps we consider to be gems, ranging from a web browser that’s better than Safari to a sheet music reader that teaches you piano.
ReederThe makers of Reeder borrowed heavily from the interface of Apple’s built-in Photos app, but we’re sure Steve Jobs doesn’t mind. This apps makes news-reading look darn gorgeous — something that newspapers still haven’t figured out how to do — and it offers one of those experiences that reminds you why you bought an iPad in the first place. Reeder displays all your RSS feeds in an albumlike interface; each feed gets its own rectangular tile. Pinch outward on a feed and it launches its list of headlines on the left and the article in a right-hand window. Pinch inward to close the feed and go back to your main menu. Here’s how good it is: Both Wired.com’s Charlie Sorrel and I love it, and we mostly read tech news RSS feeds for our jobs. (See Sorrel’s gushy review of Reeder for a closer look.) Yes, it even makes reading news for work more fun. ($5, download) Top photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 27 Jun 2010 | 8:00 pm Single comic panels that depict both cause and effect
Ed Piskor, creator of the Wizzywig comic, sez, "This article contains a dozen or so examples of comic panels that handle sequences of different related actions. Usually action is broken up through a series of panels, or even pages, but master cartoonists are able to handle a lot of information within a single illustration as evidence at the link. Good examples are hard to find."
The Art Of Cause and Effect In A Solitary Comic Panel (Thanks, Ed!) Source: Boing Boing | 27 Jun 2010 | 7:36 pm Neutrino Data Could Spell Trouble For RelativityScience News has an exploration of the deeper implications of neutrino oscillation, one experimental confirmation of which we discussed last month. "The new findings could even signal a tiny breakdown of Einstein's theory of special relativity... MINOS [for Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search] found that during a 735-kilometer journey from Fermilab to the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota, about 37 percent of muon antineutrinos disappeared — presumably morphing into one of the other neutrino types — compared with just 19 percent of muon neutrinos... That difference in transformation rates suggests a difference in mass between antineutrinos and neutrinos... With the amount of data collected so far, there's a 5 percent probability that the two types of particles weigh the same."
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Source: Slashdot | 27 Jun 2010 | 7:33 pm Foursquare close to obtaining funding: report (Reuters)Reuters - Startup website Foursquare, a location-based services company, is close to getting new funding that would allow it to expand, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 27 Jun 2010 | 7:21 pm Stiglitz: spending cuts won't cure recessionNobel prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank, blasts UK exchequer George Osborne for cutting spending during a recession. Stiglitz says it's a recipe for disaster:"If you have a household that can't pay its debts, you tell it to cut back on spending to free up the cash to pay the debts. But in a national economy, if you cut back on your spending, then economic activity goes down, nobody invests, the amount of tax you take goes down, the amount you pay out in unemployment benefits goes up - and you don't have enough money to pay your debts.I like this: "There's absolutely no reason why you couldn't tax speculative gains [from rising house or land prices] by 40 per cent. There's no social return on it and land is going to be there whether people have speculated or not. But you lower the tax on investment in things like R&D." Osborne's first Budget? It's wrong, wrong, wrong! Source: Boing Boing | 27 Jun 2010 | 7:19 pm Fix iPhone 4 Signal Glitch ⦠with Scotch Tape? (PC World)PC World - One iPhone 4 user has come up with an ingenious--and dirt cheap--solution to the antenna glitch reported by many early adopters of Apple's latest smartphone: Scotch Tape.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 27 Jun 2010 | 6:30 pm This week in search 6/27/10This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.Speed is a common theme at Google—the notion of speed is baked into all of our products, from Google Chrome to web search. Often, we also simply develop features that help deliver answers fast. Whether by displaying the exact content you're looking for at the top of your search results page or by optimizing the way you search, many of these speed enhancements save you keystrokes—and time. This week, we released two new features: Sunrise and Sunset Search feature Whether you're looking to find the best time for a morning jog or trying to plan that perfect moment for a wedding proposal, knowing exactly when the sun rises or sets can always be helpful. This week, we were happy to launch a Sunrise and Sunset feature for search. It gives the precise times of sunsets and sunrises for any location around the world. Unlike the weather, sunrises and sunsets are quite predictable, and as a result, we don't use a data source. Instead, we calculate sunrise and sunset times based on latitude, longitude and the current time. This calculation has been of interest to astronomers and mathematicians for millennia, so they’ve had time to get it just right. And for most locations, it’s accurate to within a single minute.  Example searches: [sunrise port jefferson ny] or [sunset cancun] Google Search by Voice expanded to more languages Google Search by Voice enables people to search the web faster than ever before—getting you answers with fewer keystrokes. This service was originally launched in English, and was offered in the U.S., UK, India, Australia and New Zealand. We later introduced Japanese and Mandarin to expand the number of possible users. Just a week ago, we launched the service in French, Italian, German and Spanish. Given that local dialects are a factor in the performance of speech recognition, we first launched our service in the four countries most closely associated with these languages: France, Germany, Italy and Spain. This week we followed with Korean and the launch in Taiwan of Traditional Mandarin.   To get started with Google Search by Voice, visit the Google mobile page in your country's domain (for example, in France go to m.google.fr) and download the application for your phone’s operating system in your locale. You'll find this available for iPhone, Android and Blackberry phones. Ultimately, our goal is to bring Google Search by voice to speakers of all languages, so stay tuned for more announcements here. We'll see you back here next week for more new announcements. Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search    
 Source: The Official Google Blog | 27 Jun 2010 | 5:54 pm Mexican Cuisine HD cooks, Obama's app and other iPad Apps of the Week (Appolicious)Appolicious - This week has brought a slew of really great new iPad apps. Picking just five that I like the best was difficult. There were a couple, such as The Colbert Report’s The Word for iPad ($2.99) which I would have loved to include but were simply unstable, crashing too much for me to evaluate properly (but you can bet I’ll be checking back to see if they’ve been fixed).Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 27 Jun 2010 | 5:24 pm Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy interviewed by Dale Dougherty
At O'Reilly Media's FOO Camp this weekend, BB pal Dale Dougherty, founder of MAKE:, interviewed Steven Levy about his seminal 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. The book was just republished by O'Reilly in a 25th Anniversary Edition. If you haven't read it yet, Hackers is a terrific telling of how the DIY mindset (and of course some shrewd business dealings) gave birth to the personal computer industry. The new edition includes recent interviews with Bill Gates, Mark Zukerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steven Wozniak. Hindsight is 20/20 but damn, those were different times. "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition" (Amazon) Source: Boing Boing | 27 Jun 2010 | 5:03 pm Sen. Bond Disses Internet 'Kill Switch' BillGovTechGuy writes "Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) has introduced his own cybersecurity legislation with Sen. Orrin Hatch, and he had some harsh words for a competing bill sponsored by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security. Bond said that bill, which has been criticized for allegedly giving the president a 'kill switch' over the Internet, weighs down the private sector with mandates and puts too much on the plate of the already overburdened Department of Homeland Security. Sen. Bond's bill would create a new position in the Pentagon, reporting directly to the President, in charge of coordinating all civilian cybersecurity. Any private-sector involvement would be voluntary and free from legal challenge, rather than mandated."
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Source: Slashdot | 27 Jun 2010 | 4:43 pm Just a video about an AT-AT’s afternoon adventuresThat is all. Enjoy the rest of your day. [via reddit]
Source: CrunchGear | 27 Jun 2010 | 4:24 pm Rumor: Google to Challenge Facebook with "Google Me" - PC Magazine
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 27 Jun 2010 | 3:48 pm Clash of the Titans: The Battle To Become The Mobile Search Leader
Editor’s note: The following guest post is by Krishna Subramanian, co-founder of mobile ad exchange Mobclix. Mobile search is still one of the big unclaimed prizes on the mobile web. Everyone from Google and Yahoo to Apple is going after it, but Microsoft’s Bing may stealthily become the king of the castle by aggressively promoting Bing through mobile apps. Let’s look at each player’s mobile search strategy. Apple: In The Driver’s SeatDuring the Apple keynote in April, Steve Jobs announced the new iPhone 4.0, iAd and a few other features even he didn’t seem too excited about. Out of the many mediocre features, Mr. Jobs happened to squeeze in a declaration that, “ On mobile, search hasn’t happened. People aren’t searching on their phones.” During the keynote at WWDC this month, Mr. Jobs declared that iPhone 4 users would have the opportunity to select their search engine from among Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Out of the three, Bing got a special endorsement from Mr. Jobs. Is Mr. Jobs trying to blindside the other players in this space by making them think he is not concerned about search? I’m sure all of the search traffic he is sending to Google is driving him nuts. Meanwhile, Google has happily—and quite beautifully—optimized their search results page on the iPhone to make it extremely convenient for local searches by incorporating phone numbers, maps and more within the Safari window. Remember the days you would dial 411 or, even more recently, send an SMS to GOOG for information about local businesses or venues while you are on-the-go? Does anyone do that anymore? I’m sure people love paying $1.75 to find out the name of the local pizza shop. By the time you dial 411 and struggle through the automated voice menu, you could have pulled up addresses, phone numbers and reviews to the five nearest pizza places and be one click away from an interactive map. Apple brought the traffic to mobile search, but why not make money off it? Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft all see the value of controlling search across mobile devices—not just the iPhone. Similar to the web, these three goliaths want to be the starting point for every consumer query. All three have launched iPhone specific apps with slightly different flavors as they try to first win the hearts of the iPhone user. Yahoo! Doesn’t Know What It Wants To BeYahoo! is all over the place in the App Store. It has two iPhone apps in the iTunes App Store. Within the reference category, the Yahoo! Search app is ranked at #30 with 658 comments. For the most part it includes many of the same core features that the other search apps offer. To get more mindshare from users, Yahoo! has sprinkled many other apps in various categories with the Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Entertainment apps and a pretty successful Yahoo! News app (#47 with close to 50,000 comments). This attempt to build interest just dilutes Yahoo!’s audience across multiple apps—which, if combined together, could have a significant impact.
It’s Google’s Game To LoseAs the default search engine plugged into mobile Safari on the iPhone, Google has always had an advantage driving mindshare to its mobile apps. It was the first one to use voice activated search and has steadily built out its host of features since making it easier to access core Google products like Gmail. The Google Mobile app is currently ranked first in the reference category for iPhone apps with more than 2,000 comments. Hello, Bing!Far behind when the gates opened, the Bing team is pushing out new features as fast as possible, trying to draw from Google what works best. Interestingly enough, the results (even on a local level) are quite different from the very accurate Google search results. The Bing search app received a nice endorsement from Mr. Jobs at the WWDC keynote, so lofty expectations are already set. It is currently ranked No. 2 in Reference. Microsoft released an updated Bing app last week with a few new notable features: Visual Scanning (very similar to the Red Laser iPhone app eBay acquired earlier this month) and tapping into social graphs through Facebook and Twitter status updates. The entertainment angle is allowing Bing to create a unique niche that ties back to search. It also redesigned its mobile browser search to make it more of an app-like experience. Advertising as a Distribution ChannelThe biggest hurdle is getting these app installed on as many devices as possible, but thanks to all the apps in the App Store there is an abundance of ad inventory available for marketers. App developers, if you don’t already love these big boys, you should. They have been spending significant amounts of money (think six figures-plus) desperately trying to get in front of as many of your users as possible, which translates into more money in your pocket. All of the search giants use in-app marketing to push their own apps. Yahoo! and Google have done a great job avoiding creative saturation by building out a wide array of messages, colors, languages and landing pages, as well as making use of geo-targeting. Boom! Bing Changes the GameAs the Bing team continues to spend more money on advertising, they recently changed the game, significantly crushing Google in the app rankings. How? Easy…
Attaching yourself to successful apps with consumer brand power is a sure fire way to rise to the top.“We absolutely market our applications on the iPhone, I don’t think of it as unique to anything else. It is like promoting on the toolbar,” Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President, Bing recently told TechCrunch co-editor Erick Schonfeld. “Yes, it has been effective.” For example, Bing took the Top 100s by Year app that allows users to stream songs by decade for $1.99, rebranded it to Top 100s by Year by Bing, made it free and inserted advertising to drive users to download the Bing Search App. The Top 100s by Bing app instantly surged to the top of the App Store and remained in the top five for weeks. It remains at the top of the music category hovering near favorites like Pandora and Shazam. And, as I mentioned, the Bing search app is currently No. 2 in Reference, and in the top 100 free iPhone apps overall. Ads within the Top 100s app that drive users to download the Bing app:
Fresh off the success of leveraging sponsored apps to drive downloads to the Bing app, Microsoft has recently reached out to a new audience segment by sponsoring the ESPN World Cup Trivia app, which is ranked No. 6 in the sports category. Rather than taking the viral nature of the Top 100’s music app, Bing and ESPN are also running display inventory to drive additional traffic to the World Cup Trivia app. So where does this leave the Bing search app? How about in the top 100 of all free apps and, more importantly, at one point it even squeezed Google’s app out of the top 50 free apps. Bing has taken a simple concept, executed and proved the value of the model by consistently keeping their brand top of mind across top apps in different categories. Mobile search is here, whether you want to believe it or not. Take Apple’s recent acquisition of Siri for a small sum of around $200 million to $250 million. It will be pretty easy to use that as the nucleus for an Apple-owned local search product for mobile. Not to mention the valuation is around the same price tag as what it paid for Quattro Wireless. As the market grows, Yahoo!, Google, Bing and Apple will become more cut throat. Don’t expect to see Bing ads on Google Mobile Ads or Apple featuring Yahoo!. Likewise, we may not see as many new Google and Bing apps in the App Store in the near future. But they will keep pushing forward as much as they can. After all, they probably don’t have much time before Mr. Jobs begins to think differently about mobile search.      
Source: TechCrunch | 27 Jun 2010 | 3:26 pm Chase Bank May Drop Support of Chrome, Operamwandaw writes "Banking giant JPMorgan Chase may drop support of some popular browsers because they do '...not all offer the minimum levels of security that we require while others may not perform well with our site.' After July 18 you may not be able to access the website with a browser that they do not support. The list of browsers they currently support seems outdated: Internet Explorer 6.0 and higher, Firefox 2.0 and higher, and Safari 3.0 and higher (for Macs only). With usage of IE6 plummeting and concerns about its security well known, the inclusion of that browser seems suspect. On the other extreme, rising star Chrome appears to be left out, too. What does Google think of that?"
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Source: Slashdot | 27 Jun 2010 | 3:24 pm Rumor: Verizon dropping prices on June 28th, handsets include KIN ONE, KIN TWO, Storm II & moreSection: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile  It looks like Verizon is getting ready to lower the pricing on a few handsets. According to the details, this is expected to go into effect as of tomorrow June 28th and will offer anywhere from a $30 to $50 savings on five handsets. The models include the;
Plus, the KIN ONE, KIN TWO and BlackBerry Storm 2 are all eligible for BOGA (buy on get-any device of equal of lesser value free). As for the LG enV Touch, that model is eligible for BOGO (buy one get one-same device). Via [BGR]  Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 27 Jun 2010 | 3:20 pm Verizon Charged Marine's Widow an Early Termination FeeIn a decision that was reversed as soon as someone with half-a-brain in their PR department learned about it, Verizon charged a widow a $350 early termination fee. After the death of her marine husband, Michaela Brummund decided to move back to her home town to be with her family. Verizon doesn't offer any coverage in the small town so Michaela tried to cancel her contract, only to be hit with an early termination fee. From the article: "'I called them to cancel. I told them the situation with my husband. I even said I would provide a death certificate,' Michaela said. Despite the circumstances, Verizon is imposing a $350 early termination fee."
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Source: Slashdot | 27 Jun 2010 | 2:46 pm The Pirate Bay's Founding Organization Shuts Downkcurtis sent the news that Piratbryån, the lobbying organization out of which The Pirate Bay sprang, has disbanded. (The torrent tracker is alive and well.) "Piratbyrån had many purposes, but could be described as a pro-piracy lobbying organization. It was founded in response to Antipiratbyrån, the local anti-piracy outfit in Sweden. The goal was to start a debate on copyright issues and how they affect society. Until then, most press in Sweden would simply take everything Antipiratbyrån said for granted. Internationally, Piratbyrån is mostly known for launching The Pirate Bay in the fall of 2003, just a few months after the group itself was founded. ... The final decision to disband the group came after Ibi Kopimi Botani, a prominent member and co-founder of the group, passed away. Without one of its greatest minds, the group would never be the same again, Piratbyrån's member felt."
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Source: Slashdot | 27 Jun 2010 | 2:08 pm Company Protects Australians With Its "Portector"jalovick writes "With all the talk of Internet filtering in Australia and the high cost to implement the filter, an Australian technology distributor has come up with a cheaper solution to the governments Internet filter. The Kogan Portector."
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Source: Slashdot | 27 Jun 2010 | 12:51 pm Tropical Biodiversity All About The NeighborsImage 1: Liza Comita and colleagues discovered that rare plant species are much more sensitive to the presence of neighbors of their own species than seedlings of common plant species, which may be the key to understanding tropical biodiversity. Credit: Christian ZieglerImage 2: This Cuipo seedling is growing near the base of an adult tree. Important differences in the survival of different species depending on how many of their neighbors are the same species may explain why tropical forests are so diverse. Credit: Christian ZieglerSource: RedOrbit News - Science | 27 Jun 2010 | 12:26 pm Testing The Best-yet Theory Of NatureWhy we need the spin-statistics theorem"We tested one of the major theoretical pillars of quantum field theory, the spin-statistics theorem," says Damon English, Budker's former student and a postdoctoral fellow in UC's Department of Physics, who led the experiment. "Essentially we were asking, are photons really perfect bosons?"The spin-statistics theorem dictates that all fundamental particles must be classified into one of two types, fermions or bosons. (The names come from the statistics, Fermi-Dirac statistics and Bose-Einstein statistics, that explain their respective behaviors.)No two electrons can be in the same quantum state. For example, no two electrons in an atom can have identical sets of quantum numbers. Any number of bosons can occupy the same quantum state, however; among other phenomena, this is what makes laser beams possible.Electrons, neutrons, protons, and many other particles of matter are fermions. Bosons are a decidedly mixed bunch that includes the photons of electromagnetic force, the W and Z bosons of the weak force, and such matter particles as deuterium nuclei, pi mesons, and a raft of others. Given the pandemonium in this particle zoo, it takes the spin-statistics theorem to tell what's a fermion and what's a boson.The way to tell them apart is by their spin – not the classical spin of a whirling top but intrinsic angular momentum, a quantum concept. Quantum spin is either integer (0, 1, 2…) or half integer, an odd number of halves (1/2, 3/2…). Bosons have integer spin. Fermions have half integer spin."There's a mathematical proof of the spin-statistics theorem, but it's so abstruse you have to be a professional quantum field theorist to understand it," says Budker. "Every attempt to find a simple explanation has failed, even by scientists as distinguished as Richard Feynman. The proof itself is based on assumptions, some explicit, some subtle. That's why experimental tests are essential."Says English, "If we were to knock down the spin-statistics theorem, the whole edifice of quantum field theory would come crashing down with it. The consequences would be far-reaching, affecting our assumptions about the structure of spacetime and even causality itself."In search of forbidden transitionsSource: RedOrbit News - Science | 27 Jun 2010 | 12:23 pm On destroying the iPhone 4: Not the competition, but a .50 cal bullet, microwave & blenderSection: Apple, Communications, Smartphones, Mobile, Gadgets / Other, Miscellaneous  This post may be coming from a little pent up jealousy in the fact that I did not get myself an iPhone 4—but either way—its all about destroying the iPhone. And doing so in interesting ways. For your viewing pleasure we rounded up the three most recent iPhone 4 destruction videos which include a blender, microwave and being shot with a .50 caliber rifle. Or more specifically the iPhone 4 is being shot with a Barrett M82A1 rifle. Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 27 Jun 2010 | 11:58 am Making Sense of China’s 100+ Groupon Clones
Twitter hit $1 billion valuation within 3 years. Facebook reached equal valuation with 2 years. It only took Groupon a year and a half. In April, a consortium led by Russian investment company DST invested $135 million on Groupon, making the valuation of Groupon shoot up to $1.35 billion. The excitement has lead to many Groupon-clones in China. This market is already overheated and much crazier than people expected. Reports say there are between 100 and 200 Groupon-clones in the market already. Some of them already raised a large bucket of money, and several deals are around $5 million. RenRen, the leading Chinese social network, launched its own group purchase site called Nuomi, and it only took hours for 152,095 users to buy an offer for 2 movie tickets, 2 cokes, 1 box of popcorn and 1 Häagen-Dazs ice cream. But what are the odds of survival for the Chinese clones? 1. Group Purchase, New and Old business model. If you think sites like Tudou, Youku are copycats of YouTube and Renren, Kaixin001 are copycats of Facebook, I can understand that because there were no video-sharing sites, social networks sites similar to those western services in China. But the Groupon model isn’t 100% new for China. Group Purchase (in Chinese it’s called Tuan Gou) is hugely popular in China especially in home improvement/home decoration market where thousands of people got connected online and buy the same products together in street shops in order to get a good bulk-discount. I met the co-founder of the leading group buy service site TG.com.cn weeks ago. He said his company is expecting rmb 50 million after-tax income and getting ready for an IPO. So the consumer education cost for Groupon model is nearly zero. It is an ‘old’ model, but one that has ‘new’ features to Chinese consumers since the purchases are online and there’s the ‘deal of the day’ strategy. No one ever made the online group purchase experience so easy in China. 2. An easier model to survive? Unlike video-sharing, social networks, Twitter models which are all about burning money to build its user-base at the beginning, Groupon clones are making cash-flow since the first day. And the Groupon model focuses on one deal in one city. In China, it’s not difficult to find a deal and the Internet in China is very geographically-based. It should be relatively easier for those startups to survive. However, if you have many targeting the same market, then it’s all about how to do the marketing in the end. Can you offer better share with those merchants? Do you have enough money to reach more industry sectors and grow faster? Surviving is one thing, at some point, you may also need huge money to burn. (Why did Groupon raise such amount of $$$ even when it’s already hot!!) 3. Better Service or Better Price? I’ve read some feedback from some Chinese Groupon users complaining about the service. ‘Cheap price does not mean we also accept cheap service’, they said. Groupon can offer you good price, but they can not guarantee whether or not the merchants are able to offer mass customers the service with the good quality. When your users come to you only for cheaper price, be careful, because that might also imply the customer loyalty is low. Especially in China, your customer can quickly move to another one with cheaper price or a big one with better service guaranteed. 4. Happy or Sad story in the end? Startups vs. Big guys. This is typically a sad story in China. When Web giants see interesting new business models, instead of partnering with you or acquiring yours, they launch something on their own. Renren’s Nuomi has shown its super power with huge user base. Taobao, has launched its Groupon service on ju.taobao.com, and Dianpin (the leading Yelp-like service) has also launched its t.dianping.com. They have not started heavy promotion yet, but they are watching the market until they are fully ready and the market is more mature. So why are Chinese VCs still rushing for those startups? How do they expect these sites to exit one day? A few very lucky ones could take the lead in the end with enough money to burn, or one of them could be acquired by Groupon if it comes to China one day? I’m not so sure. 5. Innovation or just Interesting? The Groupons’ Aggregator There are so many Groupon services in China, and I am assuming there are more to come. So the question becomes, where to efficiently find the best deals on each service. The answer is obvious; we need a search engine. Now we see the sites such as tg123.com, niutuan.com, 122.net to aggregate and navigate Groupon services. I don’t know what kind of partnerships are involved, but it’s smart, isn’t it? At least, it perfectly fits for overcrowded Chinese market. Before you finish the reading, the following is a list of our favorite Groupon-clones (via web20share.com). 1. Lashou
2. Meituan
3. Mituan
4. Cooltuan
5. Manzuo
7. Groupon365
8. Tuank
9. Runtuan
10. 55tuan
     
Source: TechCrunch | 27 Jun 2010 | 11:36 am Seeing Languages Differently
How we see the world impacts our use of language and our use of language impacts how we see the world. Cognitive scientists in the vein of Benjamin Whorf regularly investigate the connections to thought and language use, including how visual perception varies across languages. Since I use (authentic) visual media to assist in foreign language acquisition, my research does have a practical side to the normally impenetrable fields of visual cognition and psycholinguistics. I use photographs at the earliest stages of language learning to train the brain not only in the use of new words, but literally how to "see" in the new language. Seeing a language differently embeds that language into a visual cultural context for the learner and makes for more effective recall later. Let's look at two aspects of the visual world that provide good examples of how the visual impacts language and vary between languages and cultures: Color & Space.
ColorIn order to highlight how color perceptions vary among cultures, I like to use the example of how we linguistically categorize certain colors. Let's take the range of colors in what we call "blue" and "red" in English. When you look at the following colors, typical native English speaking respondents will describe these two colors as existing with the range of colors we call "blue". Conversely, the following two colors here represent two distinct color categories in English, namely "red" and "pink"
If one looks at other languages, this same categorization scheme is not evident. For example, the blues above are distinct color categories in Russian. Plain or dark blue (синий, siniy) is a distinct color from light blue (голубой, goluboy). Each of these color categories has its own associated meanings, invoking a specific thought for many Russians. In Moscow, there are separate blue lines on the city metro system which helped me finally learn the difference between синий & голубой . Winawer and other at MIT take a close look at this subject in "Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination." (2007) The Winawer study takes this a step further. What does it mean for the function of our brain when we categorize what we see in different ways? They show that Russian concepts of blue affect visual performance, particularly on the language users' ability to discriminate between colors. They state " ... our results suggest that language-specific distortions in perceptual performance arise as a function of the interaction of lower level perceptual processing and higher level knowledge systems (e.g. language)." This insight/observation points towards a direct connection between the language one speaks and the functionality of the visual cortex and the brain. In other words, the vocabulary you use and how you categorize the world affects the speed at which you brain can recall certain information through your optic nerves. They also hint that left brain hemisphere tasks may be affected by language and visual perception as this is the hemisphere of the brain where language and logical performance is organized. Interestingly enough, this is switched in infants as visual perception is not yet attached to a language center. Apparently, babies see color purely as what they see is not filtered through the lens of language. I am not sure what it means to see a color "purely", but the Color label wheel from Dolores Labs provides an interesting look at color perceptions within the English language.
SpaceIn addition to color, spatial perception varies among cultures according to researchers. These differences in how we perceive space (eg. size, distance, depth, and direction, etc) lead to corresponding linguistic differences manifested in the words we use to describe our surroundings in different language. This lens of language here affects how we perceive and feel about our surroundings. One might easily imagine how a phrase like "that is a large house", "it is within walking distance", or "it is located off to the right" would vary in meaning between cultures, but there are more subtle and stark differences in how we perceive space differently. The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics has several examples of cultural variances. Researcher Steven C. Levinson has interesting insights and states that in "...many cultures (as suggested by at least a third of the small sample) spatial conception is organized in a fundamentally different way than expected on the basis of familiar western languages." According to Levinson, a linguistic example can be found in the lack of spatial descriptors as in front of, in back, left of, and right of. Some languages instead use absolute terms or "fixed" cardinal direction such as north, south, upstream, downstream that are irrelevant of the direction of the speaker. Perhaps it is that certain languages are less ego-centric, linguistically speaking, and focus more on cardinal directions. Apparently, the only universal content in regards to spatial perception in language appears to be the direction 'up' since it is a function of the gravity that we all feel, regardless of our cultural or linguistic background. Geography, culture, and even technology shape how we view space in our world. In addition to variance among cultures, there is constant change within languages. Additionally, it is not solely a function of this 'lens of language'; it is both a function of our language and our experiences. For example, the exposure to mathematics and science has an impact on how we perceive space. The following figures represent some classic optical illusions to demonstrate examples of how cultures perceive length differently. In the first image, the question is "which center line is longer?
In the second image, the question is whether the blue line is longer than the red.
In both cases, the lines are the same length, we only perceive them to be different lengths; an optical illusion. Interestingly enough, these optical illusions are only perceptible by members of traditional 'western cultures'. Segall, et al. in "The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception " wrote in 1968 that susceptibility to optical illusion is, indeed, a culturally determined factor. Their experiments conclude that the "European and American samples made significantly more illusions-supported responses than did the non-Western samples." I use these examples of visual differences between cultures to highlight the point that the visual impacts language, and if you use media to teach a language, you need to use authentic media. Clip art and generic stock photography don't take advantage of the benefits of media in learning. Many language learning software developers use inauthentic images, stock photos, or clip art simply because of cost issues. A full description of the design problems in language learning software can be found in my 2003 article: CALL, commercialism and culture: inherent software design conflicts and their results ReCALL, 2003 - Cambridge Univ Press. In the mean time, I will continue to ponder how what I see affects how I think and how I think in a given language affects how I see. Google Chrome Integrates Flash (PC World)PC World - Google's Chrome has now integrated Adobe's Flash directly into the browser. Chrome 5.0.376.86 was released over Google's Stable channel and is now available to download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The update also includes five bug fixes, including two relevant to video handling.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 27 Jun 2010 | 11:24 am Review: Toshiba H30 compact HD camcorder
Pros:
Cons:
Full review: The advent of HD recording in regular point-and-shoots and in pocket cams like the Flip has put pressure on the traditional style of camcorder, and there hasn’t been much of a response. They haven’t changed much over the last decade or so, other than to continually decrease in size and increase in resolution. That’s good, but the original flavor will soon cease to impress even the most naive buyer. For now, though, they’re still here, and the H30 seems to combine the virtues of low price, compact body, and decent functionality.
The camera itself is extremely small. As you can see, it’s dwarfed by a can of beer — and it’s lighter as well. Its strength and durability are about what you’d expect; it’s plastic but well-built and has very little in the way of breakable stuff on it. The controls are minimal: zoom rocker, two mode switch buttons (motion/still), a record button and a dial that doubles as a directional pad. Once you flip out the LCD, there’s a power button and a “world” button which I’ll get to later. But it’s very economical control-wise, and nobody is likely to be confused by its operation.
The LCD, of course, is a touchscreen and most of the functions are available through the menu. You’ve got your usual resolution and scene mode select (the H30 does 1080p/30, 720p/30, WVGA/60, and VGA/60) and of course format and all that. The H30 also has a few special modes: Macro, in which the focus is locked at its closest setting They all do more or less what you expect. Slow motion really kills the exposure, but outside in good light you should be okay. Macro lets you get close but not ridiculous close — about three or four inches away from the subject. Time lapse works fine, but the screen remains on the whole time (battery warning) and it’s disappointing that it shoots video frames and not stills. That reminds me: you can of course take pictures with this thing, but I don’t recommend it except as a last resort. Much as how point-and-shoots take rubbish video for the most part, camcorders tend to take rubbish pictures. The H30 is no exception. Don’t look too close and the occasional snapshot will be fine if you can’t reach your other camera, but the noise, compression artifacts, and oversharpening are insane. Another handy feature is pre-recording. If you’re waiting for something to happen or just too slow on the draw to catch the start of a race, some first steps, or some hilarious pratfall, you’ll appreciate this. Just hit the little “world” button; now, when you hit record, it will include the previous three seconds in the video. Parents will appreciate this, though I assume it reduces battery time. The same button during playback marks movies for immediate upload to YouTube if you use their software. Navigation of the touch menus is straightforward, but not exactly snappy. Some of the buttons are also rather small and take careful aim to hit. Overall it is functional, but doesn’t feel robust.
The 3″ display is bright and responsive in normal operation, though. It reflects the framerate being recorded (except in slow-mo mode), so motion is more fluid in 60FPS mode, but it looks fine at 30 as well. It’s not particularly high resolution, but it’s easy to read and it’s clear when things are in focus (or not). 5x zoom is handy, though it seems to go in and out awfully slow. Using a pocket cam a lot, you forget how handy a real zoom can be. Video quality is… well, 1080p is a stretch on all compact devices with small sensors. People want to shoot at 1080p for some reason, even if the image quality suffers, and even if it’s going to be uploaded to YouTube in the end anyway. It’s no different with the H30. The usual suspects turn up immediately: oversharpening, skew, smearing… the usual. Look at the full frame pic here:
See how very little detail is reflected in the bricks and tree bark? The encoding isn’t up to the task, though the H30 does have better glass in front than any pocket cam. The end result is video that most people will find satisfactory, but would have trouble really saying is high definition. Skew is also very pronounced. Take a look at this little sample video: See what I mean? It’s present on almost all video devices now, but it’s always more visible on the cheaper ones. I’m not sure I’m prepared to say that the video on the H30 is significantly better than pocket cams, but I do think that the bigger lens and optical zoom give it at least a noticeable advantage in clarity and usability. Conclusion At $180, the H30 is easy to recommend — if you think a traditional camcorder is worth your money at all. It’s a bit larger and more complicated than your average Flip or Kodak, but it also brings marginally better image quality, optical zoom, and a few extra features many consumers will find handy. On the other hand, a PlaySport can be had for $120, and my personal favorite P&S, the EX-FC100, for $200. The most compelling feature of the H30 is really that it’s the same device we’ve been using for ages, just packed into an incredibly tiny package. We’ll all be recording video with our iPhone 4s and Droid Xs soon enough, but in the meantime it might be reassuring for a lot of people to have something like this sitting in a drawer, familiar and reliable. Product page: Toshiba Camileo H30
Source: CrunchGear | 27 Jun 2010 | 11:10 am Appletell reviews iMovie for iPhone 4FROM APPLETELL - When Apple announced iMovie for the iPhone 4, I was delightfully surprised. After purchasing and using the application, though, I was once again delightfully surprised. Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 27 Jun 2010 | 9:33 am Video: World Cup’s England-Germany proves once and for all that FIFA needs goal line technology immediatelyDear Fifa, Please wake up and smell the coffee: we need goal line technology, and we need it now. England’s Frank Lampard just had a 100 percent legitimate goal stricken from the record by some dunderhead linesman. DOES HE EVEN HAVE EYES? The integrity of the sport is at stake here. I’m not asking for instant replays for outfield play or anything, but we need a camera on that goal line, or a chip/sensor in the ball, and we need it now. And look at that: Fifa supremo Sepp Blatter is on Twitter. Maybe we should let him know how we feel about goal line technology?
Oh my God, back in March I predicted this exact scenario would happen. And I quote:
Oh boy…
Source: CrunchGear | 27 Jun 2010 | 8:48 am Tech Companies Seeking Business In SyriaThe United States is urging Syria to open up its markets to U.S. companies' computers and software, but fears over piracy and Internet access restrictions are holding back American technology companies from investing there.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 27 Jun 2010 | 8:35 am eMachines announce the Mini-e ER1402 PCSection: Computers  After a single horrible experience with this company, I have shunned this eMachines forever. Seeing people with smiles on their faces as they walk out of Best Buy with an eMachines product actually makes me cringe. Seriously. But after feasting my eyes upon the sleek and sexy Mini-e, I’m starting to reconsider my negative bias. Weighing in at 9 pounds and just 7.1 inches in diameter, the Mini-e can easily provide low end users basic computing features all the while being easy on the eyes. It also comes with an HDMI interface which can let you plug this baby into your HDTV. Here’s what Steve Smith, senior business manager, consumer desktops for eMachines had to say:
The Mini-e ER1402 comes equipped with a 160GB HDD, Windows 7 Home (64 Bit), four USB ports, 2 GB of RAM, an AMD Athlon II NEO Processor. Last but not least, this baby can actually be mounted behind your monitor or TV. Not bad for a price tag of $299.99. Not bad at all. Read [Business Wire] Via [Engadget] Full Story » | Written by Tarun Kunwar for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 27 Jun 2010 | 7:15 am GLOBAL BIOENERGIES: PRIOR ART IN THE ENZYMATIC PRODUCTION OF ISOBUTYLENEDear Editor,As CEO of Global Bioenergies, I wish to exercise our right of reply concerning the article in Redorbit, published June 24, 2010, on the conversion of renewable resources into the hydrocarbon gas isobutylene, a key building block for manufacturing fuels and elastomers (1).Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 27 Jun 2010 | 6:40 am Alex Threatens Gulf Of MexicoThe first named system, tropical storm Alex, could potentially complicate the oil spill clean-up in the Gulf of Mexico, experts warn. The storm formed Saturday in the Caribbean Sea.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 27 Jun 2010 | 6:35 am Plan Aims For Safer Online TransactionsWith identity theft, bank account breaches and sophisticated Internet scams on the rise, the US government is looking for ways to make transactions over the Internet more secure for both businesses and consumers.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Jun 2010 | 6:15 am Human Bite Stronger Than ThoughtThe design of the human jaw actually makes it 40 percent to 50 percent more efficient than for all great apes.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 27 Jun 2010 | 6:10 am New Givex Uptix(TM) Ticket Technology Helps Teams Beat the RecessionNEW YORK, June 27 /PRNewswire/ - Like the rest of the economy, game attendance is recovering from the hit it took during the recession.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Jun 2010 | 6:00 am Indigenous Whaling Granted To GreenlandThe annual meeting of the 88-nation International Whaling Commission came to an end with Greenland’s indigenous peoples winning the right to hunt 27 humpback whales over three years.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 27 Jun 2010 | 5:45 am Geek-a-Week trading cards (and Cory in Baltimore today and DC tomorrow!)
Len Peralta was kind enough to feature me in his Geek-a-Week trading card series (collect the whole set -- including Morgan Webb, John Hodgman, Jonathan Coulton, Jasmine Kobayashi and many, many more!). There's also an accompanying podcast.
On the subject of matters personal: if you're in the DC area, I hope to see you -- I'm at Red Emma's bookstore in Baltimore today, at 3PM (event co-sponsored by Baltimore Node). Tomorrow night, I'm at Copynight at New America Foundation, at 630, event co-sponsored by Public Knowledge.
And if you're at the American Library Association conference in DC, I hope to catch you Monday morning at 1030AM at the Science Fiction Past Present and Future Program, Convention Center 209A.B.
Musicians – This Is How You Create A Great Looking Facebook Page
Like most of you, I too LIKE Facebook, and ever since my last TechCrunch post (How to Build Engaging One-of-Kind Facebook Fan Pages), I’ve been exploring and trying to find new ways to improve the creation process of a Page. This time, I’d like to focus on a how-to for the musicians among you. If you are one of the talented musicians on Facebook, this simple guide should be of great use to you. First things first, you need to register for a SoundCloud account. That’s actually a good thing, regardless of the Page, because SoundCloud is one of the best quality music services available today. It’s an easy to use service with an elegant layout that allows you to upload your original music and lets you play the files according to the quality of your upload. If you question the site’s potential, think again, because artists like MC Hammer, Moby and many more are already using it. The reason you will need to upload your songs to SoundCloud, besides the benefits outside of your fan page, is the fact that the service that I’m about to introduce to you, connects via SoundCloud and allows you to seamlessly upload all your music from SoundCloud to your Facebook page.
RootMusic will probably be the service that changes the way Facebook looks when it comes to music (depending on how many people they can attract in the long run, of course). Yes, it’s sort of like putting a MySpace page on Facebook, but, it’s a badly needed feature, and not exactly one we have known and have been familiar with many years on either site. When you sign up at RootMusic, you can choose the free lane, which gives you the ability to customize your page with their simple editor, and also allow your fans to listen to your music while they browse through your photos, videos, and tour dates. The paid version will give you a much richer editor, the ability to add a unique banner in order to grab your fans’ attention and a tool box for adding custom background images. And, for the very reasonable price of $1.99/month, you might want to consider the paid version – but again, that might depend on how fast you want attention for your music page to grow. Assuming you want to start with the free option – choose it, and you’ll get a screen where you can fill in some information about yourself or your band: Name, Location, Bio, Contact and site information etcetera. You’ll see that RootMusic has already pulled your existing photos straight from your Facebook page (so make sure you have some photos already in there). Next, you can upload some videos from YouTube or Vimeo, again, all very easily: all you need is the video URL and you’re good to go.
As I mentioned above, you’ll be able to connect all of your SoundCloud music to your Facebook page. The service generates a playlist of your music and displays it over a very nicely done player that visitors can easily use without the need to sign up or log into any service. You are also able to upload music from your computer to the SoundCloud music platform. Please note that SoundCloud is a community exclusively for original musicians. I don’t recommend that you upload music there if you don’t have any legal right to do so. The purpose of the site is to offer musicians a chance to be have their tunes discovered and shared and for others to explore new music.
Add shows/gigs – RootMusic makes it extremely easy for you to add a show date. Everything is customizable, all you need to add are the details of the event (when-where-who) and the price. You can even add a link to where your fans can buy the tickets online. To me, this demonstrates that RootMusic really focused on what artists really need.
RootMusic also lets you stream your wall posts and your fans’ posts. You can choose to filter them and show just only your content. Additionally, you can stream your tweets as well as content from a blog or any other site that you choose. Lastly – Export this all operation to your Page. Just go to http://www.facebook.com/bandpage on Facebook, click the “add to my page” button on the left sidebar (as demonstrated in the screenshot below), and choose which page you want to add it to.
Now, go to your page, and click on the last tab, the one with the arrow sign (might be under the + sign in some pages) to see the RootMusic tab. Click on it, and drag it somewhere after the ‘Info’ tab. What you might also want to do, is to go to your Page, click on the Wall tab and then click on the options link (under the text box to the right). It will change to a ‘Settings’ button, click on that one too. A View Settings will open – now just go to: Default Landing Tab for Everyone Else – and choose the ‘BandPage’ tab. This will make sure that anyone who lands on your page before clicking on the ‘Like’ button, will see the beautiful page that you just made, first.
Though RootMusic is one of the most interesting services I’ve seen in a while, especially because people are increasingly trying to get the most out of their Facebook pages, I still think there is at least one thing that might be confusing for individual artists – the tab name. I don’t know if it’s a technical issue, but RootMusic should let artists customize their tabs instead of forcing them all to exist under the generic BandPage tab. If you can’t let users choose a tab name, go with something that fits both bands and individual artists (Music Page may sound broad, but it makes more sense). Not everyone is going to automatically know what lives inside the “BandPage” tab. Another feature that surprisingly isn’t here but is sort of an obvious one (at least to me) is a connection between Facebook events and the artist/band’s own events – it seems only logical to me to use a very well known and oft-used feature like this one and tie it in. Even if only as an addition to the ‘Add show’ feature. Either way, the results will be truly amazing (see example). I almost feel bad that I’m not a musician – I wish I could make such a cool page. To be honest though, just seeing a service such as RootMusic gives me hope of seeing more innovative things on Facebook. If they do it for the music space, then someone can surely create a fan page editing service for just about … well, anything. Then we wouldn’t have to work so hard in order to create our own pages, and we would have so many more options to choose from.
Information provided by CrunchBase      
Source: TechCrunch | 27 Jun 2010 | 5:30 am Remembering the dearly departed Bug-Eyed Monster Golden Age Comic Book Stories has a small gallery of scans from science fiction illustrator Edd Cartier's 1951 "Travelers of Space." Cartier's bug-eyed monsters are second to none. As Bruce Sterling notes, "with vampires, werewolves and zombies absolutely littering the pop-culture landscape, you have to wonder why these sweet little guys haven't made a major comeback." Travelers of Space, Published by Gnome Press ~ 1951 (via Beyond the Beyond) Source: Boing Boing | 27 Jun 2010 | 4:55 am Handmade jointed glass robotling Etsy seller Jenine sez, "I flameworked a tiny jointed glass robot in Pyrex glass. Every component of its body is sculpted by hand, with a torch. The robot is fully jointed, made only of glass, and it stands about 3 inches tall." He's adorable! Handmade Jointed Glass Robot (Thanks, Jenine!) Source: Boing Boing | 27 Jun 2010 | 4:45 am Staying Credulous: On Not Letting Being 40 Get In The Way
But one thing I am very aware of is my growing skepticism of some of the crazy startup ideas I see. Five years ago when I started TechCrunch I still had real enthusiasm for any entrepreneur trying to build a company. I know from experience that starting companies is psychologically hard, even in the U.S. There are always lots of critics to tear you down. Sometimes all an entrepreneur needs is a few credulous people willing to say that they have a chance. That gives them the psychological boost they need to fight on for another day. I have always been that guy, looking for the positive in any startup situation. Even if you fail you’ve just had the best on the job training possible. Paul Graham says it best: “So, paradoxically, if you’re too inexperienced to start a startup, what you should do is start one. That’s a way more efficient cure for inexperience than a normal job. In fact, getting a normal job may actually make you less able to start a startup, by turning you into a tame animal who thinks he needs an office to work in and a product manager to tell him what software to write.” There is some evidence that the most successful entrepreneurs are 40 or older. I don’t believe that. Or rather, it may be that statistically a startup founded by someone over 40 will be more likely to “win” financially than one started by a 20 year old. But nearly everything that is really disruptive is created by someone too young to know that they never had a chance of winning. So they blindly charge ahead, and they win. The companies that shape our culture – Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, etc. – are almost always started in a dorm room. These are the companies that matter in the long run. It’s so easy to look at a startup and think of the ten startups before that tried to solve the same problem and failed. In fact, most startups look sort of dumb in the really early stages, mostly because if they were so obviously going to win then someone would have likely jumped in already. Like I said, you have to stay credulous to believe. The wisdom that comes with experience seems like such a valuable asset to have. You have advice that people should listen to, you think, as you smirk condescendingly at the kid with the big idea and no clue what terrible obstacles stand between her and success. I sometimes feel that skepticism creeping into my thinking when I look at a new idea being presented by an eager and innocent young entrepreneur. It’s a relatively recent thing, and I want to stamp it out like a cancer. There’s no room in my world for that kind of nonsense. Who am I to tell someone that they can’t change the world? I say fight on. And if you fail I’ll give you a solid fist bump and tell you to get back on the horse, or whatever the saying is, and try again. Because you’re going to get it right, whether it’s this startup or another one. So please call me on it if you see me starting to act my age. I don’t mind being 40 at all – life definitely gets better as you get older and you figure out what’s really important. But I want to look at startups with the same eager and innocent anticipation that I did when I was 25. Even when I’m 80.      
Source: TechCrunch | 27 Jun 2010 | 2:46 am
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I turned 40 in March. I didn’t think of it much, and I don’t plan on buying a convertible sports car or otherwise engaging in a mid life crisis. These age milestones just aren’t as meaningful for most men as they are for some women. Besides, I still have the maturity level of an average teenager.