SAN DIEGO, California (Reuters) - Superheroes are enjoying a new career path, heading straight from the pages of comic books into video games and no longer having to stop at Hollywood to... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 22 Jul 2010 | 4:03 am
Though Nokia (NOK) was not among the companies whose products were included in Apple’s (AAPL) demonstration of other smartphones susceptible to signal attenuation, Cupertino has graciously opened up a spot for it on its new Smartphone Antenna Performance page.
On Wednesday, the Nokia N97 suddenly appeared between Samsung’s Omnia II and HTC’s Droid Eris along with photos and video showing the device dropping to 2 bars from 7 when held in a way that attenuates its signal reception.
A deft little jab back at Nokia from Apple and one that ably belies claims like these:
Nokia has invested thousands of man hours in studying human behavior, including how people hold their phones for calls, music playing, web browsing and so on. As you would expect from a company focused on connecting people, we prioritize antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict.”
As I said a few days ago, “For the past few weeks [this "death grip"] issue has been a storyline for Apple alone, now it’s everyone else’s as well.” Including Nokia.
Chinese authorities battled Thursday to contain an oil spill on the country's northeast coast amid reports it was spreading and as warnings emerged of a heavy long-term environmental... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 22 Jul 2010 | 3:56 am
LONDON, July 22 (Reuters) - ConocoPhillips said on Thursday it is considering either selling its German Wilhelmshaven refinery or turning it into a terminal. Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 22 Jul 2010 | 3:41 am
LONDON (Reuters) - Archaeologists have discovered a wooden version of British prehistoric monument Stonehenge at the same site, the project's leader told Reuters. Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 22 Jul 2010 | 3:26 am
July 22 (Reuters) - The following bids, mergers, acquisitions and disposals involving European, U.S. and Asian companies were reported by 0900 GMT on Thursday. Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 22 Jul 2010 | 3:17 am
An anonymous reader tips a post from Pascal Eggert, a gun enthusiast and Crytek developer, who sheds some light on how weaponry in modern shooters is designed. Quoting:
"Guns in games are like guns in movies: it is all about looks, sounds and clichés. Just like in the movies, games have established a certain perception of weapons in the mind of the public and just like in movies games get almost everything wrong. ... The fact is that we are not trying to simulate reality but are creating products to provide entertainment. ... if you want to replicate the looks of something you need to at least see it, but using it is even better. You should hold a gun in your hands, fire it and reload it to understand what does what — and at that point you will realize, there is nothing on it that does not have a function — because guns are tools for professionals. Lot of weapon designers in the game industry get that wrong. They think of guns like products for consumers or magic devices that kill people at a distance when really it's just a simple and elegant mechanism that propels little pieces of metal. Unfortunately 3D artists often only get access to the photos that Google Image Search comes up with if you enter 'future assault rifle' or, even worse, pictures from other games and movies that also got it wrong. This may explain a lot of common visual mistakes in games, especially since guns are mostly photographed from the side and egoshooters show weapons from the first person view."
Betable, where users can literally place a bet on anything and have their friends bet with them, has secured a $3 million first time funding led by Atomico, the venture fund set up by former Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. Former Skype chief strategy officer Geoffrey Prentice joins the board. It's an unusual move for a VC house to back what is in effect a gambling site, but Betable is presumably in the 'social' space sufficiently enough for Atomico to feel comfortable with the investment.
While the site is built almost entirely in the US, the CEO and founder Christopher Griffin based and launched the company in the UK where gambling laws are more more conducive to gaming sites than the US. It will compete to some extent with another UK-based social betting site founded by Americans, Smarkets, but where the latter is more for regular gamblers, Betable is designed to be a more casual "Twitter for Betting". Griffin hopes the site will attract the normal bets made between office workers or between university students (betters have to be over 18).
LISBON, July 22 (Reuters) - Portugal Telecom insisted on Thursday it has a strong legal case to defeat Telefonica's attempts to disband their Brazilian joint venture but reiterated it would prefer a mutually... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 22 Jul 2010 | 2:51 am
New York magazines Web site has linked up with Foursquare, becoming the latest media property to hook up with the location-based social networking service. AdWeek reports. Users of the service can... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 22 Jul 2010 | 2:33 am
Dan Lockton, the technology scholar whose Architectures of Control in Design has been one of my favorite reads for several years now, has just released a deck of Creative Commons-licensed cards called... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 22 Jul 2010 | 2:30 am
Dan Lockton, the technology scholar whose Architectures of Control in Design has been one of my favorite reads for several years now, has just released a deck of Creative Commons-licensed cards called "101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design." They are an outcome of his research toward his Ph.D., a set of illustrated cards showing how design can be used to change, prevent, or encourage certain behaviors. Mitch Kapor quipped that "architecture is politics," and Dan's research is the proof of it: the way that spaces, objects and systems are designed heavily influence (or even determine!) the way that we live our lives around them. They serve as both suggestions and critiques, showing how spaces and objects are designed to control us for better or for worse.
Dan sells the decks as a neatly boxed set of 117 cards for £24.50, or you can download them and share them for free. This is quite possibly the most provocative set of quick-read, random-access idea-bombs I've seen.
LONDON, July 22 (Reuters) - Lazard has hired Fotis Hasiotis from Bank of America Merrill Lynch to be co-head of its European team advising private equity firms, two people familiar with the matter said... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 22 Jul 2010 | 2:29 am
bonch writes "Attorneys General from 37 states have joined the probe into Google's Street View data collection. The investigation seeks more information behind Google's software testing and data archiving practices after it was discovered that their Street View vans scanned private WLANs and recorded users' MAC addresses. Attorney general Richard Blumenthal said, 'Google's responses continue to generate more questions than they answer. Now the question is how it may have used — and secured — all this private information.'"
AFP - A startup backed by co-founders of Twitter and Facebook launched an iPad application that takes links to news stories posted on social networks and presents them in a magazine-like format.
Exclusive to NWN, Iris Ophelia's ongoing showcase of all things stylish in SL When it comes to talking about summer fashion, the darker niches tend to get overlooked. What's a vampire to wear when they... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 22 Jul 2010 | 1:36 am
A US judge has ordered a halt to offshore oil and gas drilling off the north coast of Alaska for further environmental review, the plaintiffs in the case said. An environmental coalition Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 22 Jul 2010 | 1:29 am
The New York Times on how orchestras in the US are using text messaging to get their audiences to vote for encore or to take advantage of discounts for upcoming performances. The texting tends to be... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 22 Jul 2010 | 1:27 am
AFP - Manchester United's fans in Malaysia erupted in astonishment and anger on social media Thursday after clerics warned Muslims against wearing the team's famous jersey with its "devil" emblem.
Marine biologists in Australia are following the whereabouts of 75 great white sharks using radio-transmitter tags and a network of 20 satellite-linked buoys. PopSci reports. This information could... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 22 Jul 2010 | 1:14 am
By Jeffrey Rosen, Contributing Writer, New York Times Magazine
We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent–and public–digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.
In a recent book, “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,” the cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger cites…the importance of “societal forgetting.” By “erasing external memories,” he says in the book, “our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.” In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which everything is recorded “will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.” He concludes that “without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.”
It’s nice to hear enthusiasm on the part of Linkin Park band member Mike Shinoda about an innovative-for-the-music-industry effort to give fans a chance to be part of the iconic Grammy-winning rock band.
That’s because most artists or content creators–while making all the right sounds about the Internet’s impact on their business–often privately cringe about the idea of the ongoing flood of user-generated material that has drastically changed the industry.
Not Shinoda, who is certain he will find some real talent via a new online contest, called “Linkin Park, Featuring You,” that gives anyone an opportunity to collaborate with the band to produce an original song based on some of the tracks from the forthcoming single “The Catalyst.”
The song is on Linkin Park’s next album, “A Thousand Suns,” to be released September 14.
“We looked at it as both risky and fun to save a spot on the record that could be just anything,” he said in an interview with BoomTown earlier this week. “It’s creative, lets the fans be heard and, of course, is a great way to promote the album.”
Of course it is, but Shinoda said he is not expecting to have to put any bad quality music on the record just to sell more music.
“The album could not be any more sacred to us and this is certainly an X-factor, which is kind of a move against the grain for us,” he said. “But the Internet has actually given a lot more people a chance to be heard and, as it has turned out, amateurs are so much better than we ever expected.”
So far, Shinoda said he has just sampled a few dozen of the thousands of submissions so far, either selecting randomly or via a popularity ranking system the contest uses. He said he’s also using a range of people who are part of the Linkin Park team to filter material.
But, ultimately, Shinoda and his bandmates (pictured here) will pick the winning submission, which will either be included on the band’s new album or the winner will be invited to perform with the band on a song on the upcoming record. Either way, a pretty good prize for an aspiring musician.
Shinoda said he is hoping to hear a lot of different sounds from electronic music to keyboards to guitars and even horns (“No one has submitted a horn version so far,” he laughed. “But I hope someone does.”)
Linkin Park is using a group of Internet companies to carry out the massive user-generated effort, including: MySpace Music (platform, promotion and direct fan messaging); Indaba Music (hosting the MySpace application that allows musicians to auto-syndicate their remixes on MySpace); Top Spin Media (using their email for a song widget to deliver audio stems to all participants); and Ning (the back end to Linkin Park’s Web site where they are also distributing the audio stems to push back to contest)
There have been remix contests online done before, such as for Snoop Dogg’s “That Tree” Remix Contest that had 8,000 entries and generated a lot of fan interest.
But this effort is clearly more ambitious, perhaps because Shinoda is clearly a techie, with an ongoing interest in filling the Linkin Park Web site with puzzles, games and other interactive features.
In fact, Linkin Park had already conducted a smaller contest for fans to submit designs for characters used in a game the band released in April, called “8-Bit Rebellion,” for the Apple (AAPL) iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad. And, after the game was completed by a player, it unlocked a new song, “Blackbirds.”
Shinoda said the band hopes to do even more digitally, trying to involve and engage fans in ways that they never would have tried before.
“There is a huge unknown factor and this is not something we would have done five years ago,’ he said of the latest collaboration contest. “But I am not afraid of my fans being good at music, even if it turns out they are better than me.”
Until a winner is selected, here’s a most excellent music video of my favorite Linkin Park song, “Shadow of the Day,” because I wish I had written the perfect and simple line, “Sometimes beginnings aren’t so simple/Sometimes goodbye’s the only way” (maybe some fan will write something as good):
And here’s a blog by Sam Wick, SVP of Marketing at MySpace Music, about its partnership with Linkin Park:
Linkin Park Wants To Put You on Their New Album
Linkin Park is arguably one of the biggest rock acts in the world with more than seven million fans on MySpace and iLike, two Grammy wins and a boatload of accolades from the music community. So, needless to say, we were more than a little excited to help the band launch their next album, “A Thousand Suns.”
This is a band that’s almost as passionate about social media and technology as they are about the music they create–and they came to MySpace, because we have a proven track record of successfully architecting custom album campaigns that uniquely marry music to innovation on a global scale. With this in mind, we knew we had to do something that not only raises global awareness of the new album, but really plays into the intimate artist-to-fan connection that Linkin Park has been cultivating on our platform for years. And so “Linkin Park, Featuring You” was born–a multi-phase program that each of our 30 territories across the world are rolling out locally.
Linkin Park, Featuring You begins on MySpace with a music application that allows fans to create their own original version of the band’s new single “The Catalyst” and ends with the rare opportunity for one worthy fan to have his or her song stripped onto the next album. SERIOUS. To make this happen, Linkin Park and MySpace Music brought together Topspin Media, Ning and Indaba Music–a true technology trifecta–to allow fans to interact and play with the music before it is even released. Again, SERIOUS.
Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park has this message to share with his fans on MySpace and across the Web:
“In the lifetime of Linkin Park, the evolution of community and music technology has blurred the line between artist and fan. With the release of our new album we want to push it even further and so we are making a commitment to our fans that is a first of its kind: We are blindly dedicating a spot on our new album to something unknown. That space is reserved for you and we’re confident that you will create something that we can be proud to include on “A Thousand Suns.” This is not just a “fan-remix” contest; we want to collaborate with you. This effort is made possible by the global 360 music platform of MySpace, and the dedication and talent of our incredible fans. Thank you. We look forward to hearing your submissions.”
Here’s how it works: By installing the Indaba Music-powered app on MySpace, fans have access to five stems from “The Catalyst” that they can use to re-arrange and re-imagine the song using either their own Digital Audio Workstation or with Indaba’s free, Web-based software. Once submitted, users can vote for their favorite versions and help the band in their quest to identify new talent and ultimately pick a winner.
“Linkin Park, Featuring You” is just the beginning of a much larger partnership between the band and MySpace Music that will provide Linkin Park fans with recognition worldwide with access to live shows, exclusive content and premieres as well as opportunities to connect and interact with the band in ways that only MySpace Music can offer.
Be sure to get your entries in by July 25th and don’t forget to spread the word about the contest to your friends around the world–and go buy the new single on August 2nd.
Someday soon–later this summer perhaps–there will be a major new development in the evolution of e-books: the launch of Google (GOOG) Editions. The initial success of Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle, Apple’s (AAPL) iPad, and the e-book runners-up like Barnes & Noble’s (BKS) Nook and the Sony (SNE) Reader has established that consumers are reading books on screens in ever-greater numbers and with considerable satisfaction. While the revenues are still a relatively small part of the overall book market–somewhat less than 10 percent–the figure is growing very fast. The prediction that e-books will be 20 to 25 percent of the total in the next ten years now seems reasonable.
So what does Google Editions add to the mix? The answer, based on conversations with Google representatives and booksellers–particularly among the independent stores–is that Google will be adding millions of digital titles for sale on any device with Internet access: smart phones, tablets, netbooks, desktops, and every digital reading device except Kindle, which for now at least continues to operate on a closed proprietary system. But Google and Amazon are continuing discussions, so that may yet change.
Read the rest of this post on the original site »
Nobody knows what Android is. Nobody aside from phone geeks and marketing people. Everyone knows Droid, nobody knows Android….You know who wins in this scenario? Verizon (VZ) wins because they actually sell “Droids.” HTC sorta wins because they made the G1 and now they make a few Droids for Verizon. Google (GOOG) wins because at least for now they continue to always win.
But everyone else who makes and sells Android OS devices loses. Because when Jim, the guy from the cafe, goes into an AT&T (T) or Sprint (S) or T-Mobile store he’s not going to ask for “an Android OS smartphone.” He’s going to ask for a “Droid.” And while there’s a decent chance he’ll get a sales person who can explain what “Android OS” is and show him a delightful T-Mobile myTouch or a lovely Samsung Intercept, there’s also a decent chance he’ll get an AT&T/Sprint/TMo rep who says, “Oh, I’m sorry sir, we don’t carry Droids.” Because, well, they don’t. Only Verizon carries Droids.
The professional analysts who track Apple (AAPL) for banks and brokerage houses may have been surprised by the $15.7 billion in revenue the company reported Tuesday–an all-time record for Apple in what is traditionally one of its weakest quarters.
But the blogger-analysts we polled in advance of the earnings report were not. In fact, their consensus estimates for both revenue ($15.74 billion) and earnings ($3.66 per share) were remarkably close to the actual results ($15.7 billion and $3.51, respectively).
Yes, once again the amateurs have beaten the professionals at their own game, although it must be said that the pros did considerably better in our Apple Earnings Smackdown this quarter than they ever have before.
By Dan Pallotta, Contributor, Harvard Business Review
Someone interviewed me a few months back for an entrepreneurship project, and he mentioned that in his conversations the thing that stood out most was the willingness of great entrepreneurs to be vulnerable. It’s not the first association you’d make with an entrepreneur. Words like “driven,” “ambitious,” and “persistent” usually come to mind. But the moment he said it I knew he’d hit the nail on the head.
Vulnerability. It is the most poignant quality in every entrepreneur I know.
There’s a misfit in each of us, and it’s the most delicate, precious thing that we have. Sadly, most people make it their life’s mission to hide it, to cover it over in the same clothes, the same work, the same “regurgitations,” as Thomas Merton wrote, as everyone else. This virus of homogenization has infected the landscape.
Dell (DELL) said Wednesday that the motherboards for some of its servers were infected with malicious software that could give a cyber criminal access to information stored on the systems.
The company said in a statement that the issue only affected customers who have received replacement motherboards for four types of servers – the PowerEdge R310, R410, R510 and T410 – which is less than one percent of these models. The statement added that the virus only causes damage “when a customer has a specific configuration and is not running current anti-virus software.”
Dell says that it has removed all the infected motherboards from its supply chain and that its current stock is virus-free.
The computer maker has been contacting infected customers in order to schedule changes.
Recently, academic debate has been swirling around the existence of unusual quantum mechanical effects in the most ubiquitous of phenomena, including photosynthesis, the process by which organisms convert light into chemical energy. In particular, physicists have suggested that entanglement (the quantum interconnection of two or more objects like photons, electrons, or atoms that are separated in physical space) could be occurring in the photosynthetic complexes of plants, particularly in the pigment molecules, or chromophores. The quantum effects may explain why the structures are so efficient at converting light into energy -- doing so at 95 percent or more.In a paper in The Journal of Chemical Physics, which is published by the American Institute of Physics, these ideas are put to the test in a novel computer simulation of energy transport in a photosynthetic reaction center. Using the simulation, professor Shaul Mukamel and senior research associate Darius Abramavicius at the University of California, Irvine show that long-lived quantum coherence is an "essential ingredient for quantum information storage and manipulation," according to Mukamel. It is possible between chromophores even at room temperature, he says, and it "can strongly affect the light-harvesting efficiency."If the existence of such effects can be substantiated experimentally, he says, this understanding of quantum energy transfer and charge separation pathways may help the design of solar cells that take their inspiration from nature. ---On the Net:American Institute of PhysicsJournal of Chemical Physics Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 22 Jul 2010 | 12:52 am
It shouldn't matter to you whether the top stops spinning, because it doesn't matter to Cobb. [The Awl] Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 22 Jul 2010 | 12:44 am
oxide7 writes "The United States will make China 'a significant focus' of its beefed-up efforts to fight global piracy and counterfeiting of US goods ranging from CDs to manufactured products, a US official said on Wednesday. The International Intellectual Property Alliance, which represents US copyright industry groups, has estimated lost sales in China at more than $3.5 billion in 2009 due to piracy of US music, movies and software."
I thought it meant to search! Apparently, in this context, it means "to drop Microsoft Office and use our software!" I almost feel like a relic pointing out the obvious, but when I got my latest paper-based... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 22 Jul 2010 | 12:10 am
The late Paul Julian is best known for his background art in Looney Tunes cartoons. According to Wikipedia, he provided the smugly chipper "Beep-Beep!" of the Roadrunner (one of the few Warner Brothers... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 22 Jul 2010 | 12:10 am
The late Paul Julian is best known for his background art in Looney Tunes cartoons. According to Wikipedia, he provided the smugly chipper "Beep-Beep!" of the Roadrunner (one of the few Warner Brothers cartoon characters I can't stand).
As a sideline, Julian created the title sequences for a number of Roger Corman movies. Don't bother watching the entire movies, Julian's titles are the only part worth watching.
I wonder how much he was paid to make these for Corman? $25? $12.75? (Via Lou Romano, who has other examples of Julian's art here.)
Get ready to start hearing a lot about a startup in Seattle called Wavii. There’s been some buzz building about them, mostly leaks from spurned venture capitalists who’ve desperately wanted to invest. And perhaps a spurned corporate dev exec or two from a variety of companies that have tried to acquire the little startup way before it was ready to launch.
So what is Wavii? I don’t know because I haven’t seen it yet. But people who have seen the current alpha say it’s a stunningly original way to approach Natural Language Processing to an index of the web and retrieve highly useful pieces of information. and how that information relates to other information, current and historical.
The team was just a couple of people until just recently. Now they’re up to 5 employees. One team is working on the core NLP problems of accuracy (understanding) and performance (how long it takes to reach understanding). The old Powerset benchmarks were that it took their servers about 1 second to properly index a sentence and turn it into structured, useful information.
When the tech is done, they aren’t going to launch a new search engine like Powerset or Fuil. Instead, we hear, Wavii will automatically creates social content in real-time from news, blogs, and tweets across the web. Utilizing a proprietary piece of core Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, Wavii is able to accurately and performantly understand prose on the web, delivering information in a Facebook-like feed that users can consume like never before.
It sounds exciting! And some others have agreed. Yahoo and “some other big players” have made outright offers to buy the fledgling company before they are even close to launch. Yahoo reportedly offered up to $10 million in cash, but that didn’t get founder Adrian Aoun to change plans, say our sources. More than one Yahoo employee, though, may secretly be an angel investor in the startup.
Wavii is still in the “sshhh be quiet it’s still baking” period. But in the next few months they’ll start to let a small number of people in to test it out and give Wavii the feedback they need to tweak the product. We may even see them on stage for the first time at TechCrunch Disrupt in late September.
Want to work at this super hot startup? They’re hiring! Email: jobs@wavii.com. It’s a plus if you live in Seattle, but it’s not a requirement.
The charming geek podcast Tank Riot did a great job this week with a 2+ hour Douchebag of the Week special on Ronald Reagan: "The Tank Crew discuss the complicated 40th President of the United States, Ronald 'Dutch' Reagan. We examine how his life as an actor, his personality and his philosophy shaped the world of the 1980s and what that means for the future. From lifeguard to acting to SAG president and on to governor and president the journey was unique to Ronald Reagan. Listen to the show and get the full Tank Riot analysis!"
The charming geek podcast Tank Riot did a great job this week with a 2+ hour Douchebag of the Week special on Ronald Reagan: "The Tank Crew discuss the complicated 40th President of the United States,... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Jul 2010 | 11:54 pm
A paper in ACS Nano describes the use of graphene (nanoengineered, one-carbon-atom-thick material) as an antibacterial surface: "Such graphene-based nanomaterials can effectively inhibit the growth of E. coli bacteria while showing minimal cytotoxicity. We have also demonstrated that macroscopic freestanding GO and rGO paper can be conveniently fabricated from their suspension via simple vacuum filtration. Given the superior antibacterial effect of GO and the fact that GO can be mass-produced and easily processed to make freestanding and flexible paper with low cost, we expect this new carbon nanomaterial may find important environmental and clinical applications."
A paper in ACS Nano describes the use of graphene (nanoengineered, one-carbon-atom-thick material) as an antibacterial surface: "Such graphene-based nanomaterials can effectively inhibit the growth of... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Jul 2010 | 11:51 pm
Running a marathon is hard. I should know, I’ve never even considered running one. But a lot of people do. And a lot of people like the idea of going to watch others run marathons. I have no idea why, but they do — I’ve seen it on TV. Anyway, if you have any interest in tracking a marathon, Skyhook Wireless has a pretty cool way of doing it.
The San Francisco Marathon is this coming Sunday. To coincide with it, Skyhook Wireless has set up a new “Skyhook Experience” to track the event. On their page, you’ll be able to see geotagged tweets, Flickr photos, and Foursquare check-ins all around the event in realtime. You’ll also be able to go back in time (with a slider) to watch all of the aforementioned data evolve.
The idea is similar to the Vicarious.ly site SimpleGeo set up for SXSW. Like SimpleGeo, Skyhook is doing this to showcase their data. On the map you can not only see (and click on) individual data points, but you can see heat maps of particularly hot areas of geo data.
“On Race Day Sunday you’ll see hotspots activity – an actual application of geodata to a live event. And with the social context on top of location, we show a unique kind of view to what’s actually happening on the ground,” Skyhook’s VP of Marketing, Kate Imbach says.
She notes that they also did something similar for Country Music Festival in Nashville in June. “Turns out they love the crap out of their Keith Urban — the activity went off the charts the second he took the stage,” she humorously remarks. You can see that data here.
These data showcases do offer up a kind of neat visual way to follow events remotely. And this one saves you the hassle of running 26 miles.
These clever young gentlemen have discovered that if you lay down a big blue tarp and skateboard across it while a confederate lifts the corner, it looks just like you're surfing on the ocean blue. Gnarly!
AFP - Chinese telecoms maker Huawei Technologies on Thursday rejected allegations by Motorola that it had stolen technology secrets from the US mobile phone giant over the past decade.
Poor old Comic Sans, always getting a bum rap, as in this photo of a pair of dueling passive-aggressive door-notes at an unnamed Fortune 500 corporation. Funny: I fault signmaker the first more for the excessive use of exclamation points; and number two needs a refresher course in capitalization -- "lemonade stand" is only a proper noun if you're talking about the Apple ][+ game.
Want to own an enormous, Seth Thomas four-sided tower clock with complete works from 1904? Up for bids on eBay, starting at $26K. Each face is five feet in diameter, and the clock stood for years at Montgomery Brothers jewelers at Broadway and Fourth Street in Los Angeles.
Hugh Pickens writes "Forbes reports that although videogames have long been thought of as distractions to work and education rather than aids, there is a growing school of thought that says game-playing in moderation, and in your free time, can make you more successful in your career. 'We're finding that the younger people coming into the teams who have had experience playing online games are the highest-level performers because they are constantly motivated to seek out the next challenge and grab on to performance metrics,' says John Hagel III, co-chairman of a tech-oriented strategy center for Deloitte. Elliot Noss, chief executive of domain name provider Tucows, spends six to seven hours a week playing online games and believes World of Warcraft trains him to become a better leader."
Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, a PhD student researching Computational Trust at the University of Minnesota, has posted research comparing the organizational structure of gold farmers in virtual worlds to drug dealers in the physical world. It's a fascinating analysis, showing the underlying similarities in networks of people who undertake prohibited activities.
Figures 5 and 6 compare the identified farmer network to the Caviar drug-trafficking network. Both the real world and virtual criminal networks exhibit very similar performance and resilience under degree attack and random failures. Removing fewer than 1% of the nodes by attack keeps the fraction of the network in the LCC (largest connected component) relatively high and the number of isolates in the network relatively low. However, these networks are an order of magnitude more sensitive to node removal than the affiliate networks analyzed in Figure 4; removing approximately 5% of nodes by degree attack cuts the fraction of nodes in the largest connected component below 50% while increasing the fraction of isolates to approximately 50%.
Taken together, this analysis shows the farmer and affiliate networks have substantial resilience to both random failures and determined attacks over several orders of magnitude before fracturing into many disconnected components, a pattern which is also found in a real-world drug trafficking network. The affiliate network composed of farmers, unidentified farmers, and legitimate players exhibits even less sensitivity to attack than the clandestine networks alone. These findings suggest that farmers are able to effectively conceal their interaction patterns against the background of legitimate trade activity which also provides substantial resilience to interdiction.
Reuters - U.S. mobile phone maker Motorola Inc has sued China's Huawei Technologies Co for alleged theft of trade secrets, highlighting the fast-growing Chinese firm's difficulty in shaking the nation's reputation for piracy. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 21 Jul 2010 | 11:21 pm
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., July 22 /PRNewswire/ -- LucidPort Technology today released the USB302, a second generation USB 3.0 to SATA-II bridge designed for external USB storage devices. Following in the footsteps of the industry's first USB 3.0 device, the LucidPort USB300, the USB302 is physically smaller and consumes less power than any other chip of its kind. Its support for USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP) allows it to run 20 to 100% faster than comparable USB 3.0 drives that use legacy mass storage drivers.
The UASP standard was developed by the USB-IF to enhance the efficiency of USB storage devices. It delivers faster and more consistent performance while lowering CPU utilization. "The market expects USB 3.0 to be fast," said Reid Augustin, VP of Product Development at LucidPort. "UASP makes this a reality by running external USB drives as fast as, or even faster than drives connected directly to the motherboard."
The USB302 is highly configurable and supports many premium features. These include automatic fan control, automatic standby timer, write protection, one touch backup, a safe power down button, Blu-ray drive support, and various activity and free space indicators. The USB302 keeps total BOM costs low by requiring only a single voltage (3.3V) and a single clock source (30 MHz).
The USB302 is shipping now and available in a 48 pin (6x6 mm) QFN package.
About LucidPort Technology, Inc.
LucidPort Technology, Inc. is a fabless semiconductor company developing SuperSpeed USB and Wireless USB controllers. LucidPort's controllers add functionality to PC peripheral and consumer electronic devices like printers, scanners, digital cameras, portable media players, and external hard drives. LucidPort's technologies apply advanced hardware with integrated software to create flexible, high performance, and easy to use USB products. LucidPort is headquartered at 335 Pioneer Way, Mountain View, CA 94041, 650-968-6800, www.lucidport.com
All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
SOURCE LucidPort Technology, Inc. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 21 Jul 2010 | 11:00 pm
Military's greenhouse gas emissions are relevant to US fuel policies, University of Nebraska authors sayU.S. military operations to protect oil imports coming from the Middle East are creating larger amounts of greenhouse gas emissions than once thought, new research from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln shows.Regulators do not currently attribute these emissions to U.S. gasoline use – but they should, the authors say.UNL researchers Adam Liska and Richard Perrin estimate that emissions of heat-trapping gases resulting from military protection of supertankers in the Persian Gulf amount to 34.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent a year. In addition, the war in Iraq releases another 43.3 million metric tons of CO2 annually."Our conservative estimate of emissions from military security alone raises the greenhouse gas intensity of gasoline derived from imported Middle Eastern oil by 8 to 18 percent," said Liska, UNL assistant professor of biological systems engineering, and coordinator of the Energy Sciences minor. "In order to have a balanced assessment of the climate change impacts of substituting biofuels for gasoline, a comparison of all direct and indirect emissions from both types of fuel is required."This is why, in the national discussion on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the environmental impact of oil-related military emissions must be included in comparisons of gasoline and biofuels such as ethanol, the researchers said."Military activity to protect international oil trade is a direct production component for importing foreign oil – as necessary for imports as are pipelines and supertankers," Liska and Perrin, professor of agricultural economics at UNL, wrote in a recently published article. "Therefore, the greenhouse gas emissions from that military activity are relevant to U.S. fuel policies related to climate change."According to the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, biofuels have to meet specific reductions of greenhouse gas emissions – from 20 to 60 percent – under gasoline to qualify for substitution.That evaluation includes direct emissions and indirect emissions, meaning measurements must include not only what is being put into the air from burning fuels but also what additional emissions result from the production of the fuel. That's different from how gasoline's impact is evaluated by regulators, the researchers note. Only direct emissions are accounted for when looking at its environmental impact.So Liska and Perrin sought to understand how military emissions affect the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions from gasoline. They found multiple studies that indicate U.S. spending on military protection of maritime oil transit routes incurs an annual cost of roughly $100 billion per year.Emissions related to this military security were estimated based on government statistics and were shown to further penalize gasoline relative to renewable fuels."We hope that environment regulators will assess these military emissions associated with gasoline in greater detail," Liska said. "Such analysis should also be meaningful now when federal energy policy is being designed."---On the Net:University of Nebraska-Lincoln Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 21 Jul 2010 | 10:50 pm
You’ve likely seen the EVO 4G vs. iPhone video. Maybe you’ve seen the follow up. And maybe you’ve read the story about how these videos almost got the guy who made them fired from his job at Best Buy. Well, he’s back with another video. And it’s good.
TweetFired is the story of Peter, a man who gets in trouble with his job because of the tweets he posts. “I can’t believe you would write this bullshit about the company that writes your checks,” his boss tells him. The only problem? His tweets had nothing to do with his job. Yes, obviously this is a nice big F-You to Best Buy.
“Peter, can you imagine what our stockholders are thinking when they read these?,” his boss says at one point. ”You are painting a very negative picture of working her in 140 characters or less.” All of this echoes what Brian Maupin, the creator of these videos, told us Best Buy basically told him before they suspended him. Of course, that was about his YouTube videos, not Twitter — but you get the idea.
When Peter asks how his boss even found the tweets, his boss replies: “I simply cross-referenced your interests on Facebook, checked your favorite hobbies on MySpace, researched your work history on LinkedIn, read your personal diary on Xanga, and then broke into your house in the middle of the night and videotaped you and your wife making love.“
Good stuff.
“You do have options here Peter. I could fire you. Or you could kill yourself.” According to Maupin, Best Buy first asked him to quit when they found his videos — he declined. Best Buy eventually offered to reinstate him after reviewing his case — but he also declined that. Probably a good call considering that Paramount Pictures reached out to us the other day looking for his contact info.
New research, published in the journal Development, by Dr. Anthony-Samuel LaMantia, professor of Pharmacology & Physiology and director of the newly formed GW Institute for Neuroscience, and his colleagues have identified the stem cells that generate three critical classes of nerve cells – olfactory receptors (ORNs), vomeronasal (VRNs) and gonadotropin releasing hormone (GnRH) neurons – that are responsible for enabling animals and humans, to eat, interact socially and reproduce.This research is the first evidence identfying these stem cells. By studying mice at the earliest stages of embryonic development, LaMantia and his colleagues were able to identify the location of these cells, confirm that they divide slowly and symmetrically—thus making more stem cells, have a distinct molecular identity, and give rise to all cell types in the tissue—including ORNs, VRNs and GnRH neurons. These embryonic olfactory stem cells also are ultimately responsible for generating stem cells that remain in the lining of the nose throughout life and make new ORNs and VRNs. Thus these stem cells are also essential to enable a rare example of nervous system regeneration that continues throughout life.“By identifying these stems cells, our research will help physicians understand why people have certain genetic, neurological, and mental disabilities. Olfaction is often compromised early in the course of a number of serious diseases including autism, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease, and GnRH deficiency is important in many cases of infertility. It is my hope that in the future, we will combine this sort of cell and molecular biology with clinical practice to develop better treatments for patients with these disorders,” said Dr. LaMantia.To identify the early olfactory stem cell, Dr. LaMantia and his colleagues used multiple methods to define the identity and potential of dividing cells in the embryonic tissue that eventually becomes the nasal epithelium—the sheet of nerve cells that lines the nasal cavity. The researchers studied these tissues using molecular markers to distinguish different classes of cells and recombinant DNA technology as well as mutant mice to assess how several key genes define olfactory stem cell identity. They found a subset of cells that divide slowly and symmetrically—suggesting that these were indeed, the stem cells. They also showed that these cells were self renewing—another essential characteristic of stem cells. They defined several molecules that influence whether these stem cells remain as stem cells or divide terminally to make olfactory, vomeronasal and GnRH neurons. Finally, they showed that these stem cells uniquely give rise to ORNs, VRNs, and GnRH neurons.---On the Net:The George Washington University Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 21 Jul 2010 | 10:42 pm
Mashable - I love simple solutions to common problems. Write.fm is one of those services that manages to reduce the number of steps to do a task - in this case, sharing simple text messages and files of any kind - to the absolute minimum. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 21 Jul 2010 | 10:30 pm
An anonymous reader writes "An indie-produced item-shop-sim-slash-RPG, Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, has been localized and a demo released by the equally indie startup Carpe Fulgur LLC. The game is equal parts item shop sim (as in, item shop like the kind you find in every RPG ever, except you're behind the counter now) with certain Zelda- or Diablo-esque elements also present in the form of randomly-generated dungeons that you can grab an adventurer friend to go tromping through for loot to sell. The response so far has been pretty positive and it seems like Carpe Fulgur is trying to make a business of taking (non-pornographic) unique indie titles from Japan and getting them into a state where the rest of the world can enjoy them."
First Study to Document Education Effectiveness in Preventing Human-Cause FiresA study by USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station (SRS) scientists and research partners suggests that wildfire prevention education in Florida pays for itself several times over by saving millions of dollars in fire-fighting costs and reducing damages from human-caused fires. Researchers published their findings in a recent issue of the journal Forest Science.“This is the first study to document the effectiveness of wildfire prevention education targeted at human-caused fires such as debris-burning escapes, campfire escapes, children playing with fire, and cigarettes,” said Jeff Prestemon, SRS research forester and lead author of the paper. “We found that Florida’s investments pay for themselves multiple times over in terms of suppression spending avoided and fire damages avoided.”Researchers developed a model to quantify the effects of wildfire prevention education on preventable wildfires in Florida from 2002 to 2007. Scientists analyzed how wildfire prevention efforts reduce the occurrence, area burned and net economic losses associated with preventable wildfires. Researchers defined wildfire prevention education as public education efforts by wildfire managers that focus on the avoidance of accidentally ignited human-caused wildfires. Education could come in the form of public service announcement via media, distribution of brochures, in-person presentations, or home visits.Researchers analyzed data from actual wildfire prevention efforts and fires between 2002 and 2007. They found that the benefits exceeded costs in Florida’s fire management regions by 10- to 99-fold, depending on assumptions about how wildfire prevention education spending is allocated to these regions. Overall, results show that statewide benefits of wildfire prevention education efforts significantly outweigh their costs, where every dollar of additional spending in wildfire education prevention efforts could reduce wildfire damages and firefighting costs by up to $35. To put this into perspective: a doubling of wildfire prevention efforts in Florida compared to average 2002-2007 levels costing a half million dollars annually would have potentially averted over 800 wildfires and an estimated $11 million in combined wildfire damages and firefighting costs each year.“We also noted that between 1999 and 2008, Florida more than doubled the number of wildfire mitigation specialists in the state,” said Karen Abt, SRS research economist and co-author of the paper. “This increase in personnel is likely to have already yielded positive net benefits for residents of Florida.”The study also netted useful information regarding the effectiveness of the various types of wildfire prevention education methods. The research suggests that there might be additional potential economic gains to altering the mix of wildfire prevention education methods. Statistically, media efforts (radio, television, etc.) yield the largest net benefits per unit. Media efforts have the additional advantage that some of their costs are paid for by broadcasters, not the state. The study also suggests that presentations in public venues such as school assemblies and to homeowner associations may be another way to effectively distribute the prevention message to the public and yield larger net benefits than increasing all other education methods equally.The study is detailed in a paper titled “Net Benefits of Wildfire Prevention Education Efforts” published in the April issue of the scientific journal Forest Science. Prestemon co-authored the paper with David Butry, National Institute of Standards and Technology; Abt; and Ronda Sutphen, Florida Division of Forestry, Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. The paper is posted online at: http://treesearch.fs.fed.us/pubs/34905. ---On the Net:USDA Forest ServiceForest Science Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 21 Jul 2010 | 10:20 pm
Reuters - IBM on Thursday unveiled a new mainframe computer called "zEnterprise," which it said was the most powerful mainframe ever and is more cost-efficient than previous-generation products. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 21 Jul 2010 | 10:19 pm
Fast-growing farm-raised salmon and trout that are sterile can now be produced using a method developed by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists. Blocking reproduction can enhance growth, and is important for fish being reared in situations where reproduction is undesirable.The method allows researchers to more efficiently and reliably produce fish that have three sets of chromosomes, instead of the usual two sets. Fish with the extra set of chromosomes can't reproduce, so the energy from the food they eat is shifted from reproduction to growth. Also, cultured fish that are not capable of breeding with native populations can be stocked in natural waters.Bigger fish for consumers and sterile fish for producers and anglers are the goals of ARS scientists who are working with the aquaculture industry on genetic methods to more efficiently produce fish that grow faster on less feed and can't reproduce in the wild.William K. Hershberger, former research leader at the ARS National Center for Cool and Cold Water Aquaculture (NCCCWA) in Leetown, W.Va., and NCCCWA biologist Mark Hostuttler investigated the earliest stages of fish development, from fertilized egg to the two-cell stage, and developed a more effective way to produce rainbow trout that have four sets of chromosomes. Those trout are then crossed with typical fish that have two chromosome sets, yielding offspring that have the desired three sets of chromosomes.Now, ARS fish physiologist Gregory Weber and Hostuttler have improved on that method, and preliminary studies have expanded its application to Atlantic salmon, brook trout and brown trout. They are also in the process of breeding these fish for experiments that will determine whether these three-chromosome-set fish are good performers in terms of production traits such as growth to market size, stress tolerance, and disease resistance.Additionally, Weber and Hostuttler have developed a way to validate chromosome status on 20 fish at a time, instead of just one.ARS is the primary intramural scientific research agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The research supports the USDA priority of promoting international food security.---On the Net:USDA Agriculture Research Service Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 21 Jul 2010 | 10:08 pm
Good school leadership is critical to good education, University of Minnesota researcher saysA new study released today, the largest of its kind, offers important new evidence affirming the strong connection between what school leaders do and student achievement - and sheds new light on what effective leadership involves.The conclusions in the report, Learning from Leadership: Investigating the Links to Improved Student Learning, by researchers Kyla Wahlstrom and Karen Seashore Louis from the University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development and Kenneth Leithwood and Stephen Anderson from the University of Toronto, have broad implications for the understanding of how leadership affects learning across the United States.“The rubber hits the road in the classroom; that’s where the learning happens,” said Wahlstrom. “Leadership is important because it sets the conditions and the expectations in the school that there will be excellent instruction and there will be a culture of ongoing learning for the educators and for the students in the school.”The study demonstrates a strong, positive link between educational leaders — particularly principals — and student learning outcomes. As the topic of student achievement and test scores dominates policy discussions at the local, state, and national levels, schools and districts face mounting pressure to improve student outcomes. The report provides vital information for policymakers and educational leaders to help students succeed.Researchers of the $3.5 million study, funded by The Wallace Foundation and conducted over six years, conducted more than 1,000 interviews, surveyed more than 8,000 teachers and administrators, and observed in more than 350 classrooms at all grade levels.“In Learning from Leadership — the largest study of school leadership to date — researchers found the strongest evidence yet of principals’ significant effects on student achievement,” said Edward Pauly, director of research and evaluation at The Wallace Foundation. “With current constraints on state and district budgets, this research is all the more timely; the case is stronger than ever for investing in better leadership to improve schools and bring benefits to all students.”Learning from Leadership is an important contribution to the Wallace Foundation’s 10-year body of research into understanding and improving leadership in educational settings. The study’s authors examined leadership extensively and in its many forms — from the state and district levels to individual principals, school board members, teachers, and community members. They found that collaboration among these stakeholders correlated with improved student learning.Learning from Leadership discusses how superintendents and principals can most effectively drive gains in student achievement and how and why their practices result in instructional improvement in some contexts and not others.“Among many other findings, I anticipate readers will be especially interested in our findings about successful leadership practices, the importance of distributing those practices in coordinated ways, and the key contribution of leader efficacy in accounting for district success," said Leithwood.Among the report’s key findings: * Student achievement is higher in schools where principals share leadership with teachers and the community; principals play a key role in encouraging others to join. * Higher-performing schools generally ask for more input and engagement from a wider variety of stakeholders. * District support for shared leadership fosters the development of professional communities. Where teachers feel attached to a professional community, they are more likely to use instructional practices that are linked to improved student learning. * In districts where levels of student learning are high, district leaders are more likely to emphasize goals and initiatives that reach beyond minimum state expectations for student performance.Major challenges to effective school leadership include: * The stark lack of district support for principals’ professional development and a lack of regular contact between most principals and their district office. District leadership also needs to increase support for principals to use data-driven decision-making. * The direct negative effect of principal turnover on student achievement due to disruptions in cooperation and shared leadership with teachers * A lack of real and sustained leadership directed to improve instruction in high schools * The absence of comprehensive approaches to education reform in most statesThe rich set of findings in Learning from Leadership can help educators, policymakers, and other thought leaders understand how student achievement is linked to leadership at all levels of the education system, from the classroom to the state capital. The report’s implications are vast, but one message is clear: “Schools and districts that don’t have good leaders will struggle,” said Wahlstrom. “So leadership absolutely makes a difference. I can’t say that strongly enough: Good leadership is critical to good education.”The full report is available for free from cehd.umn.edu/carei or wallacefoundation.org. A full executive summary and a four-page Knowledge in Brief are also available. ---On the Net:University of Minnesota Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 21 Jul 2010 | 10:06 pm
Researchers find evidence that summer reading is key to maintaining or improving students' reading skillsTo children, the summer slide means water, garden hoses and slippery plastic sheets. To teachers, the "summer slide" is the noted decrease in reading skills after a vacation without books.University of Tennessee, Knoxville, faculty members Richard Allington and Anne McGill-Franzen have completed a three-year study showing a significantly higher level of reading achievement in students who received books for summer reading at home. Allington and McGill-Franzen are both professors of education; McGill-Franzen is also director of the Reading Center in the College of Education, Health and Human Sciences.Allington compares the slide in reading ability to an athlete's fitness. "Just like hockey players lose some of their skills if they stay off their skates and off the ice for three months, children who do not read in the summer lose two to three months of reading development," Allington said.According to the professors' research, the summer reading setback is the primary reason for the reading achievement gap between children who have access to reading materials at home and those who do not. Students who do not have books at home miss out on opportunities to read. Those missed opportunities can really add up."What we know is that children who do not read in the summer lose two to three months of reading development while kids who do read tend to gain a month of reading proficiency," Allington said. "This creates a three to four month gap every year. Every two or three years the kids who don't read in the summer fall a year behind the kids who do."In designing their study, Allington and McGill-Franzen set up three important differences from previous studies on the summer slide. First, while other experiments lasted one year, their study ran three years from 2001 to 2004. McGill-Franzen said their study was designed to cover three summers because previous researchers had demonstrated that a single summer school session did not boost achievement.Second, earlier studies had given the students pre-determined books, but in the Allington and McGill-Franzen study, students chose their books. Pop-culture books were the favorites, featuring musicians, athletes and television and movie characters."Research has demonstrated that choice makes a very important contribution to achievement," said McGill-Franzen.The third difference was the grade levels. McGill-Franzen and Allington targeted younger students, who were in first and second grades at the beginning of the study. Previous studies were done on students completing third through sixth grades. The researchers randomly selected 852 children to receive books and 478 students to be in the control group.The researchers' study found that summer reading is just as effective, if not more so, as summer school. McGill-Franzen and Allington compared their outcomes with studies on the impacts and costs of summer school attendance and found the summer reading program effect equal or even greater."We found our intervention was less expensive and less extensive than either providing summer school or engaging in comprehensive school reform," Allington said. "The effect was equal to the effect of summer school. Spending roughly $40 to $50 a year on free books for each child began to alleviate the achievement gap that occurs in the summer."To get books into the hands of all children for summer reading, Allington and McGill-Franzen suggest keeping school libraries open during the summer break, sending books home with the students; and building on children's prior knowledge by providing books on pop culture and local animals and habitats.The researchers' study will be published in the fall issue of Reading Psychology. ---On the Net:University of Tennessee at KnoxvilleReading Psychology Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 21 Jul 2010 | 10:00 pm
Reuters - China's top search engine operator Baidu Inc, helped by a surge in new advertisers and lower traffic acquisition costs, is poised to deliver strong results in the coming months following a forecast-beating quarterly performance. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 21 Jul 2010 | 9:46 pm
Scuba divers encountered the remains of a 3,000-year-old extinct monkey in an underwater Dominican Republic cave. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jul 2010 | 9:29 pm
If you own the LG Ally on Verizon Wireless, you’ll be pleased to know Verizon is beginning to roll out a new OTA software update. Unfortunately, the software update isn’t Android 2.2, but it does offer several improvements and enhancements to the Android smartphone. The software update is dubbed VS740ZV8 and it will probably take at least a week before every handset receives the update.
With that being said, let’s check out the improvements and enhancements of the latest update.
Improvements:
+ Increased QWERTY keyboard operability.
+ Streamlined alert functions.
+ Improved usability with alert sounds for authentication or confirmation of Bluetooth® functions.
+ Increased speed and response time for Messaging and Camera applications.
Enhancements:
+ Manage your schedule with preloaded Corporate Calendar application.
+ Improved Amazon MP3 application.
+ Preloaded Backup Assistant application is now available.
+ Enjoy an enhanced preloaded Visual Voicemail application.
+ Sync Facebook™ contacts with a new preloaded application.
If your LG Ally is plagued by any of these problems, hopefully the update will clear it up. At the very least it’s nice to see Verizon pushing out an update for one of its mid-range devices. Typically, handsets will notify you when there is an update available, but sometimes navigating to System Updates will update the device faster. Here’s how to access System Updates: Menu -> Settings -> About phone -> System updates.
In this week’s episode of Too Long; Didn’t Watch, we talk to Maureen Orth. An award winning journalist, Special Correspondent for Vanity Fair Magazine, former correspondent for NBC and author of two best-selling books, Orth’s career as a journalist spans four decades. Her passion though is education, specifically as founder of the Marina Orth Foundation which promotes advanced learning in technology and English at The Marina Orth School in Medellin, Colombia.
The school was the first in Colombia to participate in One Laptop per Child, a program that Orth credits with making a real difference to children studying in a region that was, until recently, better known for cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar. Joining us by Skype from Washington DC, Orth explains the benefits of One Laptop Per Child, responds to Valley-based critics of the program …and appeals for the Robert Scobles of the world to donate just a few of their many laptops to a thoughly worthwhile cause.
(Exciting Note! TL;DW is now available via RSS/iTunes Podcast:
Some unnamed sources have revealed that Panasonic will be unveiling a new 3D camcorder next week — one intended for consumers, unlike its semi-pro AG-3DA1, which we saw at CES. We’ve seen other 3D cameras out there but not a lot of excitement yet, likely because the means to view the content are still expensive and inconvenient.
The new Panasonic model is reported to be the same size as a normal camcorder and (this is my guess) will probably cost around a thou. If you consider that a normal consumer Panasonic camcorder costs around $500-700, and then add on the extra lens and stuff, plus the early adopter fee… a thou sounds right to me. It could be less, though. We’ll find out next week.
PC World - The (Global System for Mobile Communications) technology used by the majority of the world's mobile phones will get some scrutiny at next week's Black Hat security conference, and what the security researchers there have to say isn't pretty. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 21 Jul 2010 | 8:40 pm
coondoggie writes "Boeing today released the first public glimpse of the commercial spacecraft it is working on under an $18 million contract with NASA. Boeing's Crew Space Transportation (CST)-100 can hold seven crew and will be bigger than Apollo but smaller than NASA's Orion, and be able to launch on a variety of different rockets, including Atlas, Delta and Falcon.The company envisions the spacecraft supporting the International Space Station and future Bigelow Aerospace Orbital Space Complex systems. Bigelow is building what it calls 'expandable habitats,' that which are inflatable spacecraft would act as large, less costly space stations."
It’s the pre-back-to-school rush (or maybe the pre-pre rush) and every electronics retailer and e-tailer knows that students love new laptops. Best Buy and Walmart both have a Celeron 900-based 15.6″ laptop with 2GB of RAM and a 250GB hard drive. Best Buy’s is Toshiba, plus it has DDR3 RAM instead of DDR2, so I’d go with that one over Walmart’s Compaq. They aren’t anything special, but the fact is these are better computers than you could get for a grand a year or two ago. If you need a holdover notebook before switching to a Mac or nicer PC, this would be a good time to buy.
So why the hell are they selling these things for so cheap? Well, let’s say they’re selling these things pretty much at cost. They know that if you get the computer from Best Buy, you’ll be coming to them for repairs, extra software, and so on, and you might even fatten up that shopping cart with a wireless mouse and a game or two. It’s a loss leader to get people in the door, and there ain’t nothing wrong with taking them up on that deal.
On July 14, we reported T-Mobile USA was planning to introduce HSPA+ speeds in 19 additional markets. Today, T-Mobile USA announced the roll out is completed and the giant cell phone carrier now serves 85 million Americans. In fact, T-Mobile’s HSPA+ 4G service is now available in over 50 major cities across America and it plans on launching its HSPA+ service in 100 major markets by year’s end. If T-Mobile can roll out its service to 100 different markets, over 185 million Americans would have 4G coverage.
In addition, over 16 current 3G capable devices including the Samsung Vibrant can access the enhanced HSPA+ speeds. T-Mobile USA plans to launch a smartphone specifically designed for use on the HSPA+ network in the coming weeks. The webConnect Rocket 2.0 USB Laptop Stick is officially available today through T-Mobile retail stores. One of the main features of the webConnect Rocket 2.0 is its unique swivel form factor. In addition, the Dell Inspiron Mini 10 launches today, which is T-Mobile’s first netbook that takes advantage of HSPA+ speeds.
BELLEVUE, Wash.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Today, T-Mobile USA, Inc. announced the continued expansion of its super-fast mobile broadband network to more than 85 million Americans—the most pervasive network to offer 4G speeds1 in the country. T-Mobile® is on track to deliver HSPA+ speeds in 100 major metropolitan areas with backhaul in place, covering 185 million people in the U.S. by the end of this year.
“T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network now offers 4G speeds to more people than any other wireless network in the country”
Now HSPA+ network service is available in nearly 50 major metropolitan areas across the country, with the newest additions including Austin, El Paso, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Waco, Texas; Baltimore, Md.; Baton Rouge and Lafayette, La.; Birmingham, Ala.; Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, and Dayton, Ohio; Ft. Lauderdale and Jacksonville, Fla.; Greenville, S.C.; Honolulu, Hawaii; Indianapolis, Ind.; Kansas City and St. Louis, Mo.; Milwaukee, Wis.; Minneapolis, Minn.; Portland, Ore.; and Wichita, Kan. In addition, T-Mobile has expanded coverage in cities in previously announced metropolitan areas including Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C. 4G speeds are now available for customers in Alexandria, McLean and Reston, Va.; Anaheim, Burbank, Glendale, Irvine, Long Beach, and Ontario, CA; Annapolis, Bethesda and Chevy Chase, Md.; and Asheville and Hickory, N.C.
In addition, 16 of T-Mobile’s current 3G devices, including more than a dozen smartphones,2 can benefit from enhanced speeds when they’re on the super-fast HSPA+ network in all of these major metropolitan areas, including the newest smartphone available from T-Mobile—the Samsung Vibrant. And later this summer, T-Mobile will unveil its first HSPA+-capable smartphone. More details will be available in the coming weeks.
“T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network now offers 4G speeds to more people than any other wireless network in the country,” said Neville Ray, chief network officer for T-Mobile USA. “The aggressive pace of our HSPA+ network rollout means our customers can enjoy a better mobile broadband experience on more devices in more places today—but we’re not done yet. Our first HSPA+ smartphone is coming soon and our footprint will double between now and the end of the year.”
Complementing the network expansion is wider availability of the T-Mobile® webConnect® broadband products in T-Mobile retail stores in all HSPA+ areas including the webConnect Rocket™ USB Laptop Stick, the first HSPA+-capable device from a national U.S. wireless carrier and the Dell™ Inspiron™ Mini 10 with T-Mobile webConnect, T-Mobile’s first netbook.
Also beginning today, T-Mobile is introducing the webConnect Rocket 2.0 USB Laptop Stick, an updated form factor of its first HSPA+-capable device. Featuring a new rotating swivel USB form factor, the webConnect Rocket 2.0 is designed to deliver the same home broadband experience on the go as its predecessor, so customers can surf the Web, download large files or watch video from a laptop anytime on-the-go with a blazing-fast connection. The webConnect Rocket 2.0 enables customers to take full advantage of T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network in areas where the service is available—delivering 4G speeds.
T-Mobile network service is currently available in the following major metropolitan areas: Albany, N.Y.; Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Baltimore; Baton Rouge, La.; Birmingham, Ala.; Buffalo, N.Y.; Charleston, S.C.; Charlotte, N.C.; Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus, OH; Dallas/Ft. Worth; Dayton, Ohio; El Paso, Texas; Fayetteville, N.C.; Ft Lauderdale, Fla.; Greensboro, N.C.; Greenville, S.C.; Hartford, Conn.; Honolulu; Houston; Indianapolis; Jacksonville, Fla.; Kansas City, Mo.; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; Memphis, Tenn.; Milwaukee, Wis.; Minneapolis, Minn.; New Orleans, La.; New York; Oklahoma City; Orlando, Fla.; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Portland, Ore.; Providence, R.I.; Rochester, N.Y.; San Antonio; Seattle; St. Louis, Mo; Syracuse, N.Y.; Tampa, Fla.; Tulsa, Okla.; Waco, Texas; Washington, D.C.; and Wichita, Kan. The HSPA+ network expansion is on track to reach 100 metro areas by year end. For more information, please visit http://t-mobile-coverage.t-mobile.com/coverage.
For a long time, CafePress was the major player in customized product creation on the Internet. Slowly other sites sprang up, like Zazzle, Skreened, StickerGiant, Lulu, and many more. Many of these options are novelty one-offs, though, and you’re paying for the customization, not the craftsmanship, of the product. But the success of these somewhat kitschy sites have revealed a real hunger in consumers for customized, personalized products, and a new wave of entrepreneur is capitalizing on this trend to bring customization to chocolate, men’s dress shirts, and a whole lot more.
I’ve been exchanging emails with a number of these entrepreneurs about their products, asking them all the same questions: how and why? All of them are building something that someone wants: not a one of these folks is trying to create a market where no demand exists. Many of them are also trying hard to democratize the entire purchasing process, and working to undo the homogenization of mass-produced products.
We’re all familiar with the iconic yellow and blue WD-40 can. Who doesn’t have one sitting in their garage, even if many of us have replaced it with more sophisticated oiling solutions? But fewer of us may know the original yellow and black can, which has an excellent industrial-chic look to it. Luckily for this generation, WD-40 is going to be available in the old-school packaging for this “Now & Then” promotion. I say go pick one up (two, actually, since it only comes in a twin pack) — you never know when you might need it.
The war of the super-smartphones continues to heat up, and, at the moment, most of the combat seems to be between Apple’s iPhone and the multiplying array of competitors running Google’s (GOOG) Android operating system.
[ See post to watch video ]
Despite the weak economy, consumers seem to crave these hand-held computers, which typically cost around $200. Apple (AAPL) this week said it can’t make enough of its new iPhone 4 models to meet strong demand. HTC, the Taiwanese-based manufacturer behind many of the better-known Android phones, also is struggling to meet demand for models like the Droid Incredible on Verizon (VZ) and the Evo 4G on Sprint (S).
Now, the Korean electronics giant, Samsung, has begun rolling out an impressive new line of iPhone competitors that run on Android. These new super-smartphones are called the Galaxy S Series, and Samsung has managed to get all four top U.S. wireless carriers to agree to start selling them this summer. They share most of the same guts, but carry different model names and exterior designs.
I’ve been testing the first two Galaxy S phones, the T-Mobile Vibrant and the AT&T (T) Captivate, both of which cost $200 with a two-year contract. Neither has all the features of Apple’s latest model, like a front-facing camera for video calls or an ultra–high resolution screen, but they are worthy competitors. They have some attributes the iPhone lacks, like bigger screens and better integration of social networking.
The AT&T Captivate and T-Mobile Vibrant have bigger screens than the iPhone but lack frontfacing cameras.
The T-Mobile Vibrant has rounded corners and a prominent border that make it look very much like last year’s iPhone 3GS model. The AT&T Captivate is more angular and, to my taste, looks sleeker. Though the two phones share the same battery, the Vibrant claims better battery life. The Vibrant is longer but a bit lighter.
Both phones are multi-touch models which lack physical keyboards, though the upcoming Sprint version, the Epic, will have a slide-out physical keyboard and a front-facing camera.
For Android phone makers, a key challenge is to differentiate their models from others offering the same operating system. Samsung has chosen to do so by combining a design that’s almost as thin as the iPhone 4 with a generous, four-inch screen. That’s significantly bigger than the iPhone’s 3.5-inch display, but smaller than the huge 4.3-inch screen on the Evo and the new Motorola (MOT) Droid X, which would force the phones to be larger.
In my tests, phone calls on both models were crisp and clear. Reception on the AT&T model was about the same as on the iPhone 4, which only works on AT&T. The five-megapixel camera took sharp pictures. The camera also did a fine job with video, which is high definition. Battery life was good, though not exceptional. The phones lasted through an average day of varied use.
The screen on the Galaxy S is based on a different technology than those on most other smartphones. It’s called Super AMOLED, and Samsung claims it has better color reproduction, contrast, outdoor visibility and brightness. To my eye, the Galaxy S screens did look very good, but seemed no better, indoors or outdoors, than the iPhone 4’s screen and were slightly less sharp.
Samsung has also added some of its own touches to Android. Users can add Samsung “widgets,” such as a Buddies Now module that quickly allows access to your closest contacts. There’s also something called the Social Hub, which integrates social-networking updates and media with contact entries. This is a common feature on Android and Palm phones, but isn’t present on the iPhone.
While it’s improving rapidly, Android still isn’t quite as smooth as the iPhone’s software, and on some Android models I’ve tested, it can slow down or have a jerky quality. Not so on these Samsung models. Performance in every function I tested was snappy.
Another nice touch on the Samsung models is a generous amount of internal memory—16 gigabytes—in addition to the common removable memory card, which in this case holds two gigabytes but can be replaced at extra cost with a roomier card.
The T-Mobile Vibrant.
Also, Samsung says the new phones can hold up to two gigabytes of third-party apps, the most I’ve seen on an Android phone, which, unlike the iPhone, places limits on total app storage.
Like other Android phones, the two Samsung models offer around 65,000 third-party apps, including popular titles like the Kindle e-book reader and Facebook. That’s far fewer than the iPhone’s 225,000 available apps, but well above the measly 7,000 or so apps available for the BlackBerry.
There are some drawbacks. Like other Android phones, the Galaxy S models don’t come with a program like iTunes, which allows easy synchronization with content on a PC or Mac. You can plug the phones into a computer for manual transfer of files, but this only works smoothly on Windows PCs. On Macs, you must turn on something called “USB debugging” to make this work.
I also wasn’t crazy about the home, search and other buttons on these phones, which are found on a panel below the screen but not easily visible until you touch the panel and light the buttons up. That, in effect, means you have to touch twice to use them.
Still, for consumers who prefer Android, or who—in the case of the Vibrant and the coming Sprint and Verizon versions—would rather not be on AT&T, the Galaxy S phones present an appealing alternative to the iPhone.
Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.
I haven’t seen much information from journalists or the major PC manufacturers about the new USB 3 option. I know just a few manufacturers have it as an option with their PC. When will it be mainstream?
A:
USB 3.0 is a new, much faster version of USB that promises to transfer data up to 10 times as rapidly as the current USB ports (called USB 2.0) and to provide more electrical power to run connected devices. It’s also backwards-compatible with USB 2.0, so you don’t have to throw out your current USB peripherals. The new system should be especially helpful in cases where you are transferring large amounts of data, such as backing up computers to USB-connected hard disks.
Many computer and peripheral makers are planning to build USB 3.0 into their products, and a few have already done so, sometimes including only one USB 3.0 port while retaining a couple of the older-type ports. I expect to see even more computers and peripherals with USB 3.0 by the holiday shopping season. But it may not be “mainstream”—common on most new devices—until sometime next year.
Q:
I’m unsure how syncing works. Is there a danger, when two devices are synced, that an older version of a file might overwrite a later version?
A:
It depends on the sync software you’re using. Some syncing or backup programs do overwrite an older copy of a file with a newer one. Others, like the Hitachi system I reviewed last week, keep multiple copies, or versions, of a file that changes, so you can retrieve an older version, even after it’s been altered. If you’re concerned about this issue, make sure the sync or backup service or software you choose supports retaining enough multiple versions of a file to meet your needs.
You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online for free at the new All Things Digital web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.
The successor to the Samsung Intensity should be available sometime soon. According to a tip received by BGR, the Samsung Intensity II has already reached Best Buy stores, priced and everything. Unfortunately, the tipster didn’t have an official launch date. The Samsung Intensity II features a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 2MP camera, Bluetooth connectivity, and is available in blue. In terms of pricing, on a two-year contract the phone is available for only $1.00. However, if you opt to go without a contract, the phone will cost you $249.99. The Intensity II seems to be marketed towards young teenagers who like QWERTY keyboards for quick messaging.
Ben Patterson - I’m already a fan of T-Mobile’s burgeoning new HSPA+ data network, which promises speeds that rival 4G networks at a relatively reasonable price. Now comes word that the carrier has turned on HSPA+ service in two dozen new markets, while a smartphone that’ll support the speedy network is set for later this summer. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 21 Jul 2010 | 6:45 pm
I’m going to have to file this one under “Why didn’t I think of that?” Camarush took a simple egg timer, modified it to have a tripod mount on the bottom and the top, and then put their idea up on a website for sale. Good on ‘em, I say.
The product, called Camalapse, is designed to turn a P&S camera into the ultimate panorama camera. Just mount the camalapse on a tripod, put the camera on the camalapse, and set your camera to take time-lapse pictures. The timer turns (as egg timers do), as your camera takes pictures, which you can then stitch together. For $25, you can’t beat it. Now if they only made a DSLR version…
Just like the Wii, if you want to stream Netflix movies to the PS3, you have to use a dedicated disc in the drive for the PS3 to run the Netflix app.
During Netflix’s Q2 results report there was a mention of a dedicated streaming for the PS3. We aren’t sure of the DRM being used, but Netflix is confident that they will release the “major” update in October.
Trintech writes "According to MSNBC: 'The city of Oakland, California on Tuesday legalized large-scale marijuana cultivation for medical use and will issue up to four permits for "industrial" cultivation starting next year.
The move by the San Francisco Bay Area city aims to bring medical marijuana cultivation into the open and allow the city to profit by taxing those who grow it.
The resolution passed the city council easily after a nearly four-hour debate that pitted small-scale "garden" growers against advocates of a bigger, industrial system that would become a "Silicon Valley" of pot.' Yes, you read that right. MSNBC just compared computer chip fabrication to pot cultivation."
As you may have noticed, Twitter has had some reliability issues over the past few months. Part of this was related to the World Cup, part of it is because they just continue to grow at a fast pace — 300,000 new accounts are created a day now. It has gotten to the point where Twitter needs their own warehouse for tweet storage. So they’re building one, in Salt Lake City.
While it undoubtedly won’t be as large as Apple’s forthcoming billion-dollar data center in North Carolina, Twitter says they have been working on a “custom-built” one that will be opening later this year.
“Having dedicated data centers will give us more capacity to accommodate this growth in users and activity on Twitter,” Twitter’s Jean-Paul Cozzatti writes on the Engineering Blog today.
“Twitter will have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs. The data center will house a mixed-vendor environment for servers running open source OS and applications,” he continues.
Up until now, Twitter was using data centers built by NTT America in the Bay Area. “We’ll continue to work with NTT America to operate our current footprint. This is our first custom-built data center,” a Twitter representative tells us.
This move follows Facebook announcing its own data center back in January. That center is in Oregon, where many other companies have data centers as well — including Amazon and Google. The reason? Cheap power, a good climate (read: cooler), and tax incentives for companies to build these centers there. I’ve asked Twitter if similar reasons are behind the decision to build in Utah.
Twitter appears to be on a massive PR offensive to explain to users why they keep going down (or keep shutting off certain features — like the ability to sign-up). Twitter has a post on its main blog about this, and another post by Cozzatti that goes into the issues in detail. The basic gist: on Monday, one of Twitter main user databases got stuck in a query and the system got locked down. They had to force-restart the database server — a process which took over 12 hours. Now perhaps you see why they need more control over their systems.
“We frequently compare the tasks of scaling, maintaining, and tweaking Twitter to building a rocket in mid-flight,” Cozzatti writes.
Android-based smartphones are falling victim to something that has plagued PC users for years: bloatware.
Android phones are being pre-loaded with trial software and apps that can’t be deleted off the device by the user. These apps touting mobile TV, football games, location-based search and games are the new face of bloatware, also known as crapware or craplets in the PC world. The term is shorthand for non-essential software or media files bundled with a device in a bid to boost revenue and ostensibly give consumers a chance to try new services.
Samsung’s Vibrant phone that launched last week on T-Mobile is a good example. The device includes apps such as Mobi TV, GoGo Flight internet and Electronic Arts’ The Sims 3 game. Both Mobi TV and GoGo are applications that require users to pay a fee beyond the trial period. Motorola’s Backflip phone, introduced on AT&T a few months ago, includes Where, a location-based service app, and YPMobile, a Yellow Pages app. Even the HTC Evo is packed with programs such as Sprint’s Nascar app, Sprint Football and Sprint TV, among others.
“It’s different from phone to phone and operator to operator,” says Keith Nowak, spokesman for HTC. “But in general, the apps are put there to meet the operator’s business and revenue needs.”
Nowak’s comment is a surprising admission in an industry that otherwise prefers to call the idea of pre-loading trial apps and other non-essential software as a deal designed to help the consumer.
Handset makers have always added skins and custom widgets to Android phones, some of which can affect performance and battery life. But these widgets are usually basic apps such as calendar, e-mail or integrated social-networking feeds. Now phone makers are going a step further to load apps from other companies in a way that prevents users from deleting it completely off their phone without rooting the device — the Android version of jailbreaking a phone in order to gain complete control over it.
The preloaded apps “highlight the key features and performance” of the Vibrant, says a Samsung representative.They are there are to showcase the phone’s processor and display, a T-Mobile spokesperson told Wired.com.
But not all Android users are buying it. Some have taken to online forums to vent or find out ways to remove the pre-loaded apps from their phones. In May, The Consumerist published an e-mail from a Verizon subscriber complaining about non-essential software loaded on his device.
“It’s a throwback to the days of the feature phones,” says Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research. “Handset makers and carriers would bundle messaging and music clients with feature phones hoping to provide some differentiation. They are now trying that with smartphones.”
As far as the inability to delete these pre-loaded apps, Golvin says, “I suspect that a lot of operators think consumers won’t notice or get to a point where they would want to get rid of them.”
Computer makers started the trend of pre-loading software apps, such as anti-virus software, search toolbars, games and internet-access services from companies like AOL. It seemed innocent enough at first: Consumers would get to try new software when they bought their machines, software makers would get a chance to reach new users and PC makers would make some money on the side through deals inked with the software companies to promote their products on the devices.
But soon, many consumers found that these pre-loaded applications made their PCs run slower by increasing startup and shutdown times for their machines and hogging memory. Many of the pre-loaded programs turned out to be trial versions and required users to pay a monthly fee to keep them going. That resulted in a backlash from consumers. Even the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg railed against bloatware in a 2007 column. PC manufacturers have now significantly reduced the practice of adding bloatware on the devices.
Now, the practice is making a comeback on smartphones.
But bloatware isn’t a feature in all smartphones. AT&T hasn’t piled extraneous software onto Apple’s iPhone. Motorola’s Droid phone ships with just the core applications. Google and T-Mobile resisted the bloatware impulse with the Nexus One.
So, why does bloatware suddenly seem to be multiplying on some Android devices? Android’s popularity means every few weeks a new device running the operating system hits the market. Wireless carriers and handset makers see the new devices as an opportunity to generate additional revenue.
“Ultimately revenue from data plans will reach the same level of saturation as voice services. So carriers see some of these services as an additional revenue stream,” says Golvin.
Nowak says HTC would prefer to have pre-loaded independent apps in one folder or just in the app store but it’s not a decision for the handset manufacturer alone to make. “We have to work with our operator partners,” says Nowak. “We would prefer to give consumers a choice or put the pre-loaded in a separate store as it is with some Verizon phones.”
If they’re lucky, consumers may not have to worry about this much. Golvin says he doubts pre-loaded apps on smartphones will ever reach a similar level of annoyance as they did on PCs.
“The real shortcoming and downfall of the bloatware on PCs was it consumed system resources,” says Golvin. “With phones, operators and handset makers understand how precious those resources are.”
For now, the bloatware on phone is more about taking up storage space than processing resources. Golvin says he doubts companies like AT&T and Verizon that are locked in a fierce battle for subscribers will go over the line with pre-loaded apps.
“We are in a saturated market,” he says. “You can’t be cavalier about losing your customers.”
Bloatware, long a problem for PC users, is now rearing its head on Android phones. Android phones are being pre-loaded with trial software and apps that can't be deleted off the device by the user.
Bloatware, long a problem for PC users, is now rearing its head on Android phones. Android phones are being pre-loaded with trial software and apps that can't be deleted off the device by the user.
At the Apple event last Friday, Steve Jobs announced the iPhone 4 would be available in 17 additional countries by July 30. Right on cue, Telus will begin selling the iPhone 4 in Canada, but prices and plans are not yet available. Telus launched a special registration page for the iPhone 4 and it will email important information regarding pricing as soon as it becomes available to those who sign up. If you live in Canada and plan on purchasing the iPhone 4, it would be a good idea to register as soon as possible. Perhaps think about a case as well unless you want to face reception issues.
AP - EBay Inc. reported healthy second-quarter earnings Wednesday as more people transferred money through its PayPal payment service and shopped on its main website. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 21 Jul 2010 | 5:40 pm
MikeCapone writes "Scientists, using three NASA satellites, have created a first-of-its-kind map that details the height of the world's forests. The data was collected from NASA's ICESat, Terra and Aqua satellites. The latter two satellites are responsible for most of NASA's Gulf spill imagery. The data collected will help scientists understand how the world's forests both store and process carbon. While there are many local and regional canopy maps, this is the very first global map using a uniform method for measure."
Wired Science will now be hosting The Frontal Cortex, a neuroscience blog by Wired magazine contributor and best-selling author Jonah Lehrer. Ask Jonah a question about your brain!
If you've been down to your local blues bar recently and seen some young gun playing a beat-up 1959 Stratocaster, your eyes may have been fooling you. What looks like a vintage Strat is probably a "relic," a modern-day copy that's been artificially aged by master artisans.
If you've been down to your local blues bar recently and seen some young gun playing a beat-up 1959 Stratocaster, your eyes may have been fooling you. What looks like a vintage Strat is probably a "relic," a modern-day copy that's been artificially aged by master artisans.
FROM APPLETELL - iPhone 4 owners…not digging that Bumper Apple wants to give you for free? Some third-party case manufacturers will take it off your hands in exchange for a deal on one of theirs. MORE »
Recently, UK design studio Troika came up with a concept Ping Pong paddle (they call them bats) that that uses LEDs to show the word “PING” or “PONG” as the paddle moves through the air. Pretty cool idea, but what if you could do the same thing for regular objects in your home? Maybe a door that shows “SLAM” as you close it?
Troika’s project was just a proof of concept of course, and isn’t available commercially, but why not make your own? It’s fairly simple with a little bit of internet searching, and some Arduino bits and LEDs. In fact, there’s a kit available from Make to get you started. Just think of it as real life twitter: a spoon that says “EAT”, or a toilet that says “FLUSH” as you move it. Of course, everyone will then know that you are an electronics genius, and you’ll have to fight off the women, but what the heck, it’ll be worth it.
crimeandpunishment writes "Attorneys for Facebook and a New York man claiming majority ownership of the site faced off in a Buffalo courtroom Tuesday, and if Facebook gets its way there won't be too many more days in court. The site wants to get Paul Ceglia's claim thrown out of court. He claims a seven-year-old agreement with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg entitles him to 84 percent of the company. Facebook acknowledges Ceglia and Zuckerberg worked together, but says the contract Ceglia submitted was full of 'things that don't make sense'."
BASKING RIDGE, N.J., July 21 /PRNewswire/ -- U.S. Senators Joseph Lieberman (ID-Conn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) today introduced The First Responders Protection Act of 2010 to provide resources to the nation's public safety community for building an interoperable wireless network.
Verizon Wireless Vice President and General Counsel Steve Zipperstein supported the legislation with this statement:
"Our nation's public safety officers can do their jobs best when they can communicate with each other over wireless telecommunications systems that are fully interoperable. The First Responders Protection Act of 2010, introduced by Senators Lieberman and McCain, addresses the three critical issues that will bring interoperable wireless broadband services to public safety: spectrum, funding and governance. We wholeheartedly endorse this approach, which directly allocates spectrum to public safety for building out a national, interoperable wireless network and provides the funding required to build that network.
"As President Obama, the FCC and Congressional leaders work to bring an additional 500 MHz of spectrum to market for commercial innovation, open auctions will maximize dollars to the U.S. Treasury while providing the financial resources public safety will need to build out dedicated, interoperable wireless networks. By dedicating just 10 MHz of D-block spectrum - two percent of the 500 MHz total - to public safety, we give emergency service providers the resources they need to do their jobs right."
About Verizon Wireless
Verizon Wireless operates the nation's most reliable and largest wireless voice and 3G data network, serving nearly 93 million customers. Headquartered in Basking Ridge, N.J., with 81,000 employees nationwide, Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications (NYSE, NASDAQ: VZ) and Vodafone (LSE, NASDAQ: VOD). For more information, visit www.verizonwireless.com. To preview and request broadcast-quality video footage and high-resolution stills of Verizon Wireless operations, log on to the Verizon Wireless Multimedia Library at www.verizonwireless.com/multimedia.
SOURCE Verizon Wireless Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 21 Jul 2010 | 4:49 pm
MILPITAS, Calif., July 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Grandis, Inc., the leader in spin transfer torque random access memory (STT-RAM), today announced it has appointed Mohamad Krounbi as senior vice president of engineering. Drawing on more than 25 years of experience in the magnetic storage industry, including executive and senior management roles at Hitachi GST, Western Digital, Read-Rite and IBM, Krounbi will be responsible for all STT-RAM technology and product development at Grandis and for ensuring that the company's licensees incorporate the best technology and processes as they bring their STT-RAM products to market.
"We are delighted to welcome Mohamad Krounbi to Grandis,'' stated Farhad Tabrizi, president and CEO of Grandis. "He has spent the majority of his career in executive positions in Fortune 500 companies, building first-rate teams and delivering world-class products. His track record is unsurpassed and I know he will make an exceptional leader of our engineering team. He will bring added discipline to our magnetic materials and process development activities, which in turn will greatly benefit the product schedules of our customers."
"STT-RAM is an exciting technology that has been pioneered by Grandis and has the potential of serving a great segment of the memory market," said Mohamad Krounbi. "It is the only solid-state memory technology that is non-volatile, fast, low power and scalable, making it the leading memory solution of the future. I am very impressed with the management and engineering teams at Grandis, and look forward to adding a focused, product oriented discipline to the company's development. Product development and prototype qualifications combined with advanced materials development for future scalability are the essential ingredients for taking a new technology to market."
Prior to joining Grandis, Krounbi was General Manager and Vice President of Engineering at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, where he was responsible for worldwide wafer manufacturing, product design and process development. He led the development and ramp of the first perpendicular magnetic recording head and Hitachi's magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) read head that enabled the world's first terabyte server product. Previously, he was Senior Vice President of Wafer Operations and Process Development at Read-Rite Corporation and Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Western Digital. Earlier in his career, he spent 19 years at IBM where he was Director of Head Development and member of the team that developed the world's first magneto-resistive (MR) recording head product. He holds over 40 patents in magnetic storage, head design and process technology and has received numerous awards throughout his career, including election to the IBM Academy of Technology in 1995 and corporate recognition from Hitachi for the launch of its first perpendicular magnetic recording product in 2006. He holds a B.S. degree in Physics from Hagazian College, Beirut, Lebanon, and an M.S. degree in Physics from San Jose State University.
About Grandis, Inc.
Grandis is the leader in the development of spin-transfer torque RAM (STT-RAM), also known as STT-MRAM or SpinRAM, a universal and scalable memory solution. Grandis licenses its technology to companies that are developing a variety of products incorporating stand-alone and embedded STT-RAM memory. It offers its licensees a complete range of support services from process installation through qualification. By combining non-volatility and high performance with low-power consumption and low cost, STT-RAM can revolutionize the performance of electronic products in many areas. Grandis was established in 2002, and is headquartered in Silicon Valley, California. Investors include Matrix Partners, Sevin Rosen Funds, Applied Ventures LLC, Incubic and Concept Ventures. Additional information about the company is available on the Internet at www.grandisinc.com.
SOURCE Grandis, Inc. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 21 Jul 2010 | 4:48 pm
Earlier today, we reported sales of the Nexus One would end by the end of July, however, it looks like the end happened sooner than most people suspected. If you navigate to Google.com/phone, you will be greeted with a message saying sales have ended. The text reads:
Sorry, folks…
The Nexus One is no longer available for purchase directly from Google. For more information on how to purchase the Nexus One, check out our help center.
If you still want the N1, Vodafone in Europe and KT in Korea will still be selling Google’s smartphone. For registered developers, Google will have extra Nexus One devices in stock available at a later date. Hopefully you were able to grab an N1 during its final phase of sale.
To most people, online chat service Meebo is best known for its multiprotocol webchat, but for over a year now its primary focus has been the Meebo Bar — a persistent toolbar that third party websites can embed on their pages to facilitate sharing through services like Facebook, Twitter, and email. That bar now reaches nearly 150 million people per month through dozens of large third party integrations. Last week CEO Seth Sternberg swung by TechCrunch headquarters to discuss the current status of the Bar, and how it’s turning a single ad unit into some serious revenue.
We last did a deep dive on the progress of the Meebo Bar in December, when Quantcast figures showed it reaching nearly 100 million unique visitors across Meebo partner sites. That number on Quantcast is now up to nearly 150 million, and since August, comScore says that Meebo’s uniques are up nearly 300%. In terms of functionality the Meebo Bar hasn’t changed much since I last spoke to Sternberg, but the amount of money it pulls in certainly has: Sternberg says that the Bar is doing 4x revenue growth year over year, and that revenue is 4x right now what it was in January. In other words, things are picking up quickly (though it’s worth pointing out that Meebo declined to share any concrete revenue figures).
The monetization effort is built around a single, interactive ad unit on the left side of the Meebo Bar that performs unusually well, with users clicking on the ad on over 1% of impressions. When a user clicks on the ad, an interactive, rich media overlay appears on the screen. Here, too, Meebo sees very strong engagement: once activated, the average time spent with one of these ads is 50-60 seconds. In light of its success, Meebo has built out a sales team dedicated to this one ad unit. The company has grown to 115 employees (up from 70 in December), with much of the growth in direct sales and brands.
Along with the new growth stats, Sternberg also shared that Meebo has recently rewritten its social bar to address the slowdown issues commonly associated with third party plugins. Sternberg explains that many large publishers find that the third party plugins they integrate to boost functionality and sharing have the unwanted side effect of slowing down load times (the more plugins you have, the slower you get). The new version of the Meebo Bar, which will be rolling out of the course of the next week, has had its download size reduced by over 50% (it’s now under 100K), with pings of less than 10ms.
A New Challenger Approaches
Up until now, the Meebo Bar hasn’t had too much serious competition. Sure, some larger publishers have created their own bars, and there are certainly other third party alternatives, but Meebo has cemented its position as the web’s most popular social toolbar. The landscape may change soon, though: at f8 Facebook announced plans to launch its own social bar, which will allow third party sites to quickly integrate a ‘Like’ button and Facebook Chat.
Sternberg says that Facebook and Meebo will definitely be jockeying for the same screen real-estate on third party sites, but he thinks that it can beat Facebook on openness. He explains that Meebo’s Bar has support for a broad number of networks like MSN, MySpace, Twitter, and email; Facebook may well only offer Facebook (and probably email) integration. He also points out that Meebo’s bar is more customizable, so publishers can integrate their own applications or Twitter streams.
And his points probably aren’t just spin. Given the ubiquity of Facebook and the rapid adoption of its ‘Like’ buttons, there’s no doubt that Facebook will pose a serious challenge to Meebo. But publishers don’t stand to gain from giving Facebook so much power over their traffic and user experience, either, so they may well turn to the more flexible alternative. Then again, Facebook may have a way to offer engaging social features in its toolbar that its competitors can’t, which would make the situation all the more interesting.
We’ll have to wait until Facebook’s social bar is actually released to find out — despite a preview nearly three months ago at f8, it’s still nowhere to be seen.
We recently got our hands on a WP7 unit and put up our in-depth impressions of Microsoft’s new mobile OS, and our verdict is cautious optimism. But even if it were the hottest thing we’d ever seen, Microsoft would still be in a pickle when it comes to getting these things out there. Giving away something like 90,000 phones ought to help with that.
We recently got our hands on a WP7 unit and put up our in-depth impressions of Microsoft’s new mobile OS, and our verdict is cautious optimism. But even if it were the hottest thing we’d ever seen, Microsoft would still be in a pickle when it comes to getting these things out there. Giving away something like 90,000 phones ought to help with that.
I know for a fact now that I’m going to be seeing these around Seattle — there isn’t room to swing a cat in this city without giving a Microsoft employee a mouthful of hair. This little act of generosity (probably costing MS somewhere around $2-4 million, depending on costs) also serves as a sort of beta program, I’m sure — if they plan on rolling this thing out in one piece, testing at scale is extremely important.
Actually, it’s unclear when these handsets will make it into the hands of Microsoft’s myriad workers (nine myriad, to be precise), but the whispered October launch date getting closer every day, so I’d guess soon. Feel free to comment or hit the tip line if you’re at MS and know more.
Whenever the rumor mill gets to chatting about the iPhone heading to another carrier beyond AT&T, it’s almost always focused around Verizon. On the off chance it’s about someone else, it’s generally Sprint. Oddly, the one most oft forgotten is the one that, from a technical standpoint, would be the easiest transition: T-Mobile. AT&T rocks SIM cards — so does T-Mobile. The only thing keeping a T-Mobile iPhone from happening is the lack of support for T-Mobile’s 3G bands — and AT&T’s nasty little exclusivity agreement, of course.
That exclusivity agreement is often said to be coming up on the end of its lifespan — and according to the latest whispers, T-Mobile is waiting with open arms.
The word comes through Cult Of Mac from a “highly placed” (aren’t they all?) source at T-Mobile. According to their tipster, talks are “in the advanced stage”, with a T-Mobile iPhone “about 80% likely” to launch in Q3.
Now, I’m not one to chalk up rumors as nonsense on a whim, but I’m also not one who likes to get everyone’s hopes up for no reason. We’ve heard this one before. Lots, and lots of times, for each and every carrier. You can bet your arse that the iPhone will be spreading out to as many carriers as possible the second AT&T’s exclusivity agreement is up, but for all we know that agreement isn’t up until 2012. There’s always talk that such-and-such loophole is letting Apple escape the agreement early, or that a new agreement has been reached — but so far, they’ve all been the pipe dreams of would-be iPhone owners waiting on the edge of their seat but refusing to jump ship from their carrier.
(Tangent: Also, where the heck does someone pull a number like “80% likely” from? How can something like this even be measured by probability? Silly.)
Think its going to happen? Where would you pin the odds? If I had to guess, I’d wager it’s somewhere between -312% and 104%. Let us know in the comments below.
SAN FRANCISCO, July 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Yelp (http://www.yelp.com), the community-led local search site, today announced the availability of Yelp Germany (http://www.yelp.de). Representing the second non-English language country for Yelp, Germans can now access Yelp.de to read and share reviews about great local businesses in their native language.
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20050511/SFW134LOGO)
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20050511/SFW134LOGO)
"Germans have long had an appreciation for great food and cultural spirit," said Geoff Donaker, Chief Operating Officer of Yelp. "Couple that heritage with a country renowned for business and technical prowess, and the combination of old and new strongly aligns with Yelp's mission of discovering great local businesses through digital means, which makes the site a natural fit for Germany."
Yelp Germany follows the May 2010 release of Yelp France (http://www.yelp.fr), the June 2009 release of Yelp Ireland (http://www.yelp.ie), and the January 2009 release of Yelp UK (http://www.yelp.co.uk). Yelp UK now sees over 1 million unique users a month since launching 18 months ago - an even faster growth rate than Yelp experienced in its first US market of San Francisco and a strong indicator that Yelp is poised to gain the same type of traction in Europe.
Yelp for iPhone and Yelp for Business Owners will be available shortly after the launch of Yelp.de.
About Yelp! Inc.
Yelp (www.yelp.com) is a website that connects people with great local businesses. Yelp was founded in San Francisco in July 2004. Since then, Yelp communities have taken root in major metros across the US, Canada, UK, Ireland and France; Yelp drew an audience of more than 33 million unique visitors in June 2010. Yelpers have written more than 11 million local reviews, making Yelp the leading US local guide for real word-of-mouth on everything from boutiques and mechanics to restaurants and dentists. For more information, please visit yelp.de or send an email to press@yelp.com.
Media Contacts:
Stephanie Ichinose (San Francisco)
415-908-3679
press@yelp.com
Nicole Jung (Germany)
+49 511 260 98 22 41
njung@hopscotch.eu
SOURCE Yelp! Inc. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 21 Jul 2010 | 4:01 pm
Last week I received a pair of Marvel Comics headphones, which arrived arrived courtesy of Coloud. That means I not only had a chance to check out a new set of headphones, but I also have a set to giveaway to one lucky reader. But before we dive into the giveaway, lets cover some of the details on the headphones, including my thoughts.
My thoughts
The Marvel Comics line of headphones are available in a few varieties, you can choose from the Hulk, Iron Man, Punisher, Wolverine and X-Men Retro. They are all priced the same—at $39.95.
So basically we are looking at a $40 set of headphones—and quite honestly I never really expect super high quality in headphones at that price. Thankfully that is where I was surprised though, and the Marvel Comics headphones surprised me on a few levels.
First, they sound really good. But perhaps more important is that they are comfortable to wear, they are well made and have an awesome design. Well, that last one did not surprise me as I sort of knew what to expect there. As for use, granted I have only spent a few days playing, or more specifically a few hours listening, but can say that I will be sad to see these leave.
I will expand on that a little bit by saying that the ear pieces swivel which helps get a nicer fit, the cord is a decent size but its also fairly thick which means you should have less to worry about in terms of cord damage, they are easily adjustable and the top headband is nicely made. Oh and, getting back to that comfort, that comes in part due to the nicely padded ear pieces.
The headphones all vary in color and style by character. The model that I have here is the Punisher, which is black with the Punisher logo on the earpieces and the word “Punisher” written across the top of the headband.
The bottom line
Fun headphones at a nice price. I would not hesitate to recommend, of course I would suggest being a comic fan. That said, I am pretty sure this review just cost me $40 as I was looking for a new set of headphones and these seem to have meet my needs. So in short, what better way to recommend than be willing to spend my own money.
The giveaway
Short and sweet. The contest is open as of this posting and will run through Sunday July 25, 2010 at 12 noon EST. In order to enter you have to do one thing—send an email to robert (at) gadgetell (dot) com with the subject line of Coloud Marvel Headphone Giveaway. After the contest ends I will pick one person at random and then ship out the headphones.
Short Version: The Clickfree C2N USB drive provides a simple way to back up multiple computers without a NAS. The software is functional and user-friendly, but better network access might have set the device apart a bit more.
Features:
Includes Clickfree backup software
Built in USB cable, as well as a dock
Works with both Mac and PC
MSRP: $179.99 (500GB) as reviewed
Pros:
Included software works great
Plug the drive into each computer you want to back up once, and then it works over your network, wireless or not
Compact size
Cons:
USB speed makes larger files take a while to back up
Backup software is always running in the background
Can’t connect to network without a computer
Full review:
Clickfree’s C2N is a portable USB drive that comes pre-installed with software for both the Mac and the PC. From a hardware standpoint, there’s nothing particularly spectacular about the C2N;it’s nice and compact, the drive has a short cable permanently attached, but it also has a spot to plug a longer cable into the bottom of the enclosure. The C2N also comes with a desktop dock, allowing you to leave the drive plugged in and waiting for the next scheduled backup procedure. The drive itself is a standard 2.5″ laptop drive, in a glossy black enclosure with a blue LED to indicate when the drive is powered or being accessed.
Where the Clickfree really shines is the software. You install the software on each computer that you want to have backed up by simply plugging the drive in, and then allow software to run. After the software is installed, you can then allow it to decide automatically what files to back up, or manually select the folders or file types that you want to have stored. The software will then run at the scheduled time, and back up your files for you.
The whole process is essentially transparent once you have the software installed. The software will run on each computer that you have it installed on, and automatically talk to the drive no matter what computer you have it plugged into. This means that if you have, say, two desktop computers and two laptops in your location, you can plug the C2N into one of the desktop computers and the backup software will automatically back up to the drive using your wireless or wired network. I do realize that isn’t necessarily anything new — network administrators have been setting up backup software to do this type of process for years. The difference is that the Clickfree software is essentially plug and play, and easy enough to use that I’d recommend it to even the least technologically-inclined person.
Unfortunately, the Clickfree system isn’t perfect. Obviously, you have to leave the computer the drive is plugged into powered on, as well as any computer that you want to back up automatically. Generally, this just means leaving the computer on overnight, but that’s sometimes less then ideal. And you definitely want the backup to run in the middle of the night, because of the speed limitations of the USB 2.0 connection that the drive uses.
I would have liked to see an ethernet connection in the dock, but that takes us more into the area of a NAS and the C2N is designed for the home user rather then someone who wants the capabilities of a full blown network backup system. The Clickfree software is also always running in the background. Of course, it doesn’t have a large memory footprint (it’s actually quite small) but there is always a small icon somewhere on your computer reminding you that the backup system is there.
Conclusion:
I recommend the C2N for anyone who needs an easy to set up, transparent backup system. Most people don’t back up their computers as often as they should, and products like the C2N are ideal to help overcome that laziness factor. It’s also so easy to setup that I’d recommend it to pretty much everyone, from the business user who just wants things to work, to the home user who wants to make sure that those pictures of grandma don’t get lost when their hard drive fails.
Researchers think they've determined the genetic markers for the most successful sled dog traits. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jul 2010 | 3:44 pm
adeelarshad82 writes "Given Steve Jobs' recent claims about 'Death Grip' being a common problem among smart phones, PCMag tested out six major iPhone competitors to see how they would react to the grip. The test included Motorola Droid X, T-Mobile myTouch 3G Slide, Droid Incredible by HTC, BlackBerry Bold 9650, and the Samsung Captivate. The signal strength was measured in dBm, which typically ranges between -50 to -110 dBm (numbers closer to zero show better signal). Interestingly, the test results video showed mixed results. T-Mobile myTouch 3G and Samsung Captivate showed drastic changes, dropping down to -89 and -97 dBm respectively. On the other hand, while the signal strength dropped for HTC Droid Incredible, Motorola Droid X and Blackberry Bold, it wasn't as severe. Results of testing showed that not all phones reacted the same way to the typical death grip and required variations of it to bring about results."
Business is booming for Netflix — but not quite as booming as Wall Street expected. The company announced its Q2 2010 results today and highlighted a number of key stats. Most notably, the service is now past 15 million total subscribers (15,001,000, to be exactly) — the first time they’ve crossed that threshold. A year ago, they were at about 10.6 million subscribers — meaning they’ve grown 42 percent in that time.
Q2 marks the third consecutive quarter that Netflix had added over a million new subscribers, CEO Reed Hastings says. That said, the growth was not as large as it was in Q1. But that hasn’t hurt Netflix’s bottom-line because an increasing number of these subscribers are now streaming movies and television shows rather than getting them over the mail. In fact, now 61 percent of all of Netflix’s subscribers streamed at least 15 minutes of content in Q2 — this is up from 37 percent a year ago, and 55 percent in the Q1 2010.
GAAP net income was $43.5 million in Q2, versus $32.4 million last year — and, significantly, $32.3 million last quarter. So again, income is way up. Revenue is also up — it’s at $519.8 million now, versus $408.5 million last year and $493.7 million last quarter. But Wall Street had been expecting revenue to be slightly higher. As a result, the stock is now down around 9 percent in after-hours trading. Netflix’s stock has nearly tripled in price this past year.
In its full year projections for 2010, Netflix expects to end the year with 17.7 million to 18.5 million subscribers. In total, they think revenue for the year will be at $2.14 billion to $2.16 billion — with net income at $141 million to $156 million. Again, that’s for the full year.
Netflix is clearly continuing its move towards a streaming catalog service. Deals signed this year mean they don’t even get access to most new-release DVDs until 30 after they’ve been released by studio. Rival Blockbuster doesn’t have such agreements in place, and they’re hoping it can save them from almost certain death. But Netflix is smart to realize that the future is streaming, and they’re quickly becoming the de-facto service for these catalog titles thanks largely to the deals they’ve struck to get their service on devices such as the Xbox 360 and the iPad. Soon, they’ll be bringing the streaming service to the iPhone as well.
Netflix also remains the gold standard when it comes to customer service. Whenever the streaming service experiences even a small hiccup, I get an email asking if I’d like a partial refund of the month. Can you imagine AT&T or Comcast doing that? I can’t — because it doesn’t happen.
Full Committee Hearing Reengages Members, Positions Bill for a Mark-Up
WASHINGTON, July 21 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Today, the House Committee on Financial Services held a hearing to discuss the Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection and Enforcement Act (H.R. 2267). The legislation, introduced by Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA), would regulate Internet gambling activity in the U.S. and require licensed operators to put in place safeguards to protect against underage and problem gambling.
"With the recent passage of financial reform legislation, it's great to see the Financial Services Committee now with the opportunity to focus its attention on other issues such as Internet gambling regulation," said Michael Waxman, spokesperson for the Safe and Secure Internet Gambling Initiative. "Today's hearing demonstrates that regulating Internet gambling remains a top priority for Chairman Frank. We're optimistic that this hearing will give the Committee the final push it needs to schedule a vote on the bill."
Committee members heard testimony from representatives of the financial services, tribal and poker communities who spoke in support of regulating Internet gambling.
Ed Williams, member of the Board of Directors of the Credit Union National Association (CUNA) spoke of the challenges faced by financial services companies who are forced to comply with burdensome rules in an attempt to prevent unlawful Internet gambling transactions. Williams testified that H.R. 2267 would promote "...regulatory simplicity while assisting financial institutions compliance with UIGEA."
Lynn Malerba, Tribal Chairwoman of the Mohegan Tribe discussed the role tribes engaged in the gaming industry play in Internet gaming and praised Chairman Frank for the great respect he has shown "...for tribal sovereignty by actively seeking the input of tribes" to ensure their fair treatment under the legislation.
Professional poker player Annie Duke testified about the consumer safeguards and revenue potential under H.R. 2267. Duke maintained that American poker players "...want to play on sites licensed in the United States, which will provide for even greater consumer protections for the player and yield badly-needed tax revenue for state and federal governments."
With Committee members reengaged on the issue, today's hearing sets the stage for a vote on Chairman Frank's legislation.
"Lawmakers who have not yet taken a position on this issue should realize that their constituents are likely among the millions of Americans who wager online despite attempts to prohibit the activity," said Waxman. "Members would best serve their constituents by accurately representing their interests and supporting Chairman Frank's bill."
Internet gambling regulation has been the subject of several previous congressional hearings. Most recently, in May 2010, the House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing to discuss the Internet Gambling Regulation and Tax Enforcement Act of 2010 (H.R. 4976), a companion piece of legislation to the Frank bill introduced by Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) that would ensure the collection of license fees and taxes on regulated Internet gambling activities. According to a tax revenue analysis conducted by the Joint Committee on Taxation, regulated Internet gambling is expected to generate nearly $42 billion in revenue for the federal government over its first 10 years. Estimates suggest that it would also generate as much as $30 billion in new revenues to the states.
In addition to permitting licensed gambling operators to accept wagers from individuals in the U.S. and mandating consumer protections, Chairman Frank's legislation reinforces the rights of each state to determine whether or not to allow Internet gambling activity for people accessing the Internet within the state and to apply other restrictions on the activity as determined necessary. Since its introduction in May 2009, a bi-partisan group of 69 co-sponsors has signed onto the legislation. A recent analysis by H2 Gambling capital predicts that Internet gambling regulation would create up to 32,000 jobs over its first five years.
For additional information on today's hearing and complete witness testimonies, please visit the House Committee on Financial Services Web site.
About Safe and Secure Internet Gambling Initiative
The Safe and Secure Internet Gambling Initiative promotes the freedom of individuals to gamble online with the proper safeguards to protect consumers and ensure the integrity of financial transactions. For more information on the Initiative, please visit www.safeandsecureig.org. The Web site provides a means by which individuals can register support for regulated Internet gambling with their elected representatives.
SOURCE Safe and Secure Internet Gambling Initiative Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 21 Jul 2010 | 3:27 pm
Comics mastermind Alan Moore turns down the rights to
Watchmen, which he claims DC offered him in return for his blessing on future prequels and sequels.
As for pricing and availability—the Motorola i1 will set you back $299.99, but the good news there is that comes contract free. Otherwise, the handset is available in-store only at this time.
In terms of features you will find goodies such as Motoblur, support for Boost walkie-talkie as well as a 3.1 inch display, 5 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, Stereo Bluetooth. Of course you will also have the Google goodies including Gmail, Google Talk and Google Maps as well as access the to Android Market.
All said and done there is really only one issue here—the version of Android. The Motorola i1 is launching with Android 1.5 and that means you will not have access to some of the nice apps including Navigation with turn-by-turn directions.
For a long time, CafePress was the major player in customized product creation on the Internet. Slowly other sites sprang up, like Zazzle, Skreened, StickerGiant, Lulu, and many more. Many of these options are novelty one-offs, though, and you’re paying for the customization, not the craftsmanship, of the product. But the success of these somewhat kitschy sites have revealed a real hunger in consumers for customized, personalized products, and a new wave of entrepreneur is capitalizing on this trend to bring customization to chocolate, men’s dress shirts, and a whole lot more.
I’ve been exchanging emails with a number of these entrepreneurs about their products, asking them all the same questions: how and why? All of them are building something that someone wants: not a one of these folks is trying to create a market where no demand exists. Many of them are also trying hard to democratize the entire purchasing process, and working to undo the homogenization of mass-produced products.
Think for a moment how subtle customization is a part of your every day life. Movies on demand at Netflix allow you to watch what you want to watch, not what the programming director at some cable channel feels like airing. You can put together specific playlists of only songs you actually want to hear, instead of what the radio broadcasts. You can order that Big Mac without onions, and get a shake instead of a soda with your value meal. Your computer is customized, your iPod is the color you want it and connected to the headphones you like the best, and on and on. How many of your decisions every day are the result of your specific decision to customize the things around you? And yet, you buy your clothes off a rack…
No better example of the problem of homogenization exists than clothing. Factories churn out millions of garments every day, all in the “standard” sizes in order to maximize profit while minimizing cost and effort. But really, how well do the standard sizes fit you? I’m a tall, lean fellow, so XL is just a shade too small and XXL is too baggy. We’ve all grown up accustomed to poorly fitting garments. Not everyone has the means to connect with a tailor to get really good fitting clothing, and others see it as an expense that can’t be justified: we’ll just live with the standard sizes and make peace with the fact that our sleeves are a little too short and the collar a little too tight.
So it’s little surprise that three of the entrepreneurs with whom I’ve communicated are working to make custom-fitted clothing easier to design and purchase. Danny Wong of Blank Label tells me that Blank Label started as a pretty traditional custom tailor shop: they’d come to your office, measure you up, show you a book of swatches, and worked up a dress shirt or suit for you. Eager to try something new, but still leveraging their existing supply chain, they embarked on the design-it-yourself path. Wong observes that demand for customization permeates our everyday lives:
One big factor is a shift in consumer demand. With products and services like iTunes and Pandora where you pick and choose your own music, BK’s “have it your way” motto, Build-a-Bear’s create-your-own teddy bears, consumers are hungry to get product personally made for them and designed by them.
Peter Crawfurd and Michael Yang from ShirtsMyWay quickly came to the obvious conclusion that they “could bring it up to another level with the internet”:
There is the whole aspect of being able to design your own shirts and preview which wouldn’t be possible in the offline world. It is also convenient for customers to get their shirts delivered to their door and then when they need new shirts they’ll just go in and order more and get the same great fit.
I asked Seph Skerritt of Proper Cloth if dress shirts were an intentional decision for him, or if it came as the result of an iterative process:
Yes, we specifically set out to do shirts. It did not evolve that way.
I like the dress shirt category because I believe finding a good fitting dress shirt off-the-rack is difficult for a lot of people. Technically, it’s easy to understand why. Dress shirts have several fit-points that are all critical (collar size, sleeve length, chest/waist size, length). If the sleeves are an inch too long or too short, it will be noticeable and if the collar is too tight, you’ll be very uncomfortable. Furthermore, dress shirts are made from woven cotton with little stretch, leaving little room for error. The result is that standardized sizes (small, medium, large, etc) frequently do not meet customer’s demands. With more tailored/fitted looks in fashion, this becomes even more of an issue. With the growth of e-commerce and improvements in manufacturing/supply chain capabilities, I think there’s a huge opportunity to disrupt the established industry with a made-to-order business model.
An interesting twist on customized clothing comes from Nicholas Marx of Bespokeable, currently in closed beta: a marketplace for customized products backed by a recommendation engine. Bespokeable is currently focusing on clothing, but they have plans to expand to other customized goods.
I did specifically set out to build the recommendation engine that powers the personal outfitting service. However, the idea to turn over the production to actual tailors and build a marketplace was indeed the result of an iterative process. The original idea of Bespokeable was actually a clothing line. In a nutshell, we’re zigging, where everyone else is zagging.
The Bespokeable recommendation engine, according to Marx, will benefit both buyers and sellers:
We take certain data from the buyers such as their hair, eye, & skin color (amongst others) to be used to recommend certain fabrics that will look best with each person. We think that it’s this dedicated focus on personalization that will make the buyers want to use Bespokeable’s market. Bespokeable’s system also gets better for buyers each time they uses it. When someone buy something on Bespokeable, we use that data to recommend future items to that same person as well as to other people who are like that person. This actually acts as an incentive for the buyers to go through Bespokeable, which in turn is an incentive for the sellers to stay on our system…
Certainly there’s a price premium imposed on customized clothes. But the old adage “you get what you pay for” may never have been more appropriate. You can pay a little for mass-produced goods made from cheap materials and assembled as quickly as possible; or you can pay a bit more for a quality garment that’s made from good material by a real human being with an eye for detail. Marx opines about the future of craftsmanship and customization:
It’s also worth noting that it’s independent craftsmen who are best suited to meet the increase in demand for one-off products, not large factories that are designed for mass-production. If you think about it, the clothing industry hasn’t really changed since the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps this “customized micro-production revolution” will be the Second Industrial Revolution.
The trend toward customization extends far beyond custom clothing, though. In addition to Chocri for custom chocolates, there’s also Chocomize, founded by Eric Heinbockel, Nick LaCava, and Fabian Kaempfer. Customized chocolate was a ripe opportunity for business because, according to their research, chocolate is a relatively recession-proof luxury good and customers were becoming increasingly demanding when selecting premium chocolates. Despite America’s sweet tooth, there are still some hurdles for Chocomize and its peers to overcome.
The biggest challenge that we see in this space is simply that Americans are still unfamiliar with the concept of co-creation on this scale. Americans take for granted that their computers are customizable or their cars are customizable during the shopping process but they are unaware of the ability to customize other, smaller purchases particularly food. While we have been very successful at getting our own brand name out through national outlets like Oprah Magazine, the Costco Connection, or Reuters our companies have to both educate consumers about the co-creation process and then educate the consumer about the specific brand.
A bit more discussion with other entrepreneurs in the customization space confirms that it’s still focused largely on luxury goods, or higher-end products. For example, Brad Lindenberg is pushing customized golf clubs at his site Lind Golf. You don’t need golf clubs, in, say, the same way you do need decent clothing, so Lind Golf is targeting dedicated golfers. Visitors can get a perfectly fitted golf club for their height and swing, and now have it laser etched for more visible personalization.
We manufacture our golf shafts, grips and ferrules in 9 different colors and offer over 20 shaft and grip upgrade options to customers (allowing for over 50 million possible combinations of clubs). The internet model means we can stock all our equipment in component form and assemble our gear only when an order comes in. This means we can make a club in left hand, minus 1/2 inch with a red shaft, black grip and red club head and ship it out the very next day. A retail store cannot offer this level of customization and turn it around so quickly.
I’m not a golfer, but the golfers I know do take their activity pretty seriously. If you’re going to spend the time and money to play with any regularity, I’d assume you’d want equipment that was comfortable to use and performed well. Customization of clubs pretty obviously addresses that.
There are, of course, lots of other sites offering lots of unique customized luxury products. We’ve covered Shapeways, the customized fabrication shop, a number of times before, and they keep rolling out new products and new materials. There’s also Fluid Forms where you can create customized belt buckles, streetmap clocks, and more. All of these are things to enhance your home or to make a really unique gift, rather than address commodity needs.
Rounding out the entrepreneurs with whom I spoke is Arwa Jumkawala, creator of Gemkitty, where you can design customized jewelry for that special someone in your life.
There’s always been custom work in fine jewelry, but it tends to get very expensive, difficult, and time consuming. Having been in the gem and jewelry trade my whole life, I thought there was a huge opportunity to take that process, democratize it, and just make it easier.
Gemkitty launched last fall, and while they don’t have a lot of repeat business yet, Jumkawala tells me they’ve also not yet had any returns of their products, which I think is a real testament to the quality of their creations, and how meaningful it is to the recipient.
One of the most interesting things, to me, to learn from these discussions about customization is the level of fraternization amongst many of the people in this space. Several of the folks quoted in this piece contacted me on their own and helpfully included in their opening emails links to their peers doing customization in other areas. Certainly there’s a level of competition — Blank Label, Proper Cloth and ShirtsMyWay are all courting the same clients, basically — but they’re all cognizant of this fact, and speak highly of one another. Each feels confident that they can compete on their own and remain relevant in this burgeoning aspect of e-commerce. ShirtsMyWay is touting their seven trillion combinations, but their products are made in Asia; while Proper Cloth makes all of their shirts in the U.S., which may be an important consideration for some shoppers.
In some ways, a lot of these customization offerings are the logical progression of e-commerce, and we can likely expect a growing ecosystem of customized products available for purchase. Clothing and jewelry and golf clubs all make sense to personalize. Will we ever be able to design our own toilet paper patterns, or screwdriver handles, or silverware? Would we ever need to?
David Cameron, Britain's new Prime Minister, is currently in the United States for talks with President Obama. The two leaders have a lot of weighty issues to discuss: the BP oil spill and the war in Afghanistan spring to mind. ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jul 2010 | 3:07 pm
Zachary Adam Chesser, a 20-year old student from northern Virginia, is arrested on charges of providing material support to al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-aligned Somali extremist group.
CARLSBAD, Calif., July 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Patriot Scientific Corporation (OTC Bulletin Board: PTSC) today reported that its wholly owned subsidiary, Patriot Data Solutions Group (PDSG), has entered into a strategic partnership agreement with SRA International, Inc. Under the agreement SRA will become a reseller of PDSG's Crossflo DataExchange® (CDX) line of products. SRA serves government organizations in the national security, civil government and global health markets with technical expertise in areas including cyber security; enterprise resource planning; IT systems; strategic management consulting; systems engineering; and wireless integration.
"SRA has demonstrated a strong history of deploying solutions, such as its law enforcement product GangNet, that capitalize on information sharing," said Patriot Scientific interim CEO Cliff Flowers. "We are pleased that SRA has identified PDSG and its CDX product line as an important enhancement to initiatives that promote data sharing. We are excited about this partnership and look forward to working together on opportunities that complement existing SRA deployments as well as future initiatives."
PDSG's CDX Enterprise Solution is both an enterprise-class middleware platform and an end-to-end Justice systems integration solution. The solution includes CDX ExchangeBuilder, which enables agencies to visually model information exchanges and develop NIEM-conformant Information Exchange Package Documentation (IEPD). It includes a complete, secure, and robust data exchange platform and the CDX Enterprise Portal that represents a secure community interface for all identified Justice users. Built upon the Global Federated Identity and Privilege Management (GFIPM) framework, the CDX Portal allows Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) agencies to pass local security credentials and roles into the enterprise. The portal also includes CDX FindIt!, a best-of-breed data discovery application that allows users to search, sort and discover records enterprise-wide.
"In this era of an ever-expanding information glut, timely information sharing is critical to improving operational effectiveness both within an enterprise and across organizations," said SRA Senior Vice President of Offerings and Products Pat Burke. "The need to enhance data quality through the use of structured engineering processes and tools like PDSG's CDX is key to architecting and executing the mapping, extraction, transformation, and loading routines associated with data exchanges. We look forward to leveraging PDSG's CDX to make our solutions more powerful, and easier to scale and maintain as needed," said Burke.
About Patriot Scientific Corporation
Headquartered in Carlsbad, California, Patriot Scientific Corporation (PTSC) provides data sharing and secure data solutions for a connected world. These activities are funded with revenues generated, in a large part, from the Moore Microprocessor Patent(TM) Portfolio. For more information on Patriot Scientific Corporation, visit: www.ptsc.com.
About Patriot Data Solutions Group
Patriot Data Solutions Group, Inc. ("PDSG") provides products and solutions that enable mission-critical applications to significantly accelerate the time to value and reduce total cost of ownership for their data-sharing initiatives. The company's flagship product, the Crossflo DataExchange® solution, helps link systems together and facilitates secure data sharing for any information exchange initiative in the public safety and criminal justice markets. The solution has been designed to work directly with a number of national data sharing standards, including NIEM (National Information Exchange Model), and the Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM) and HL7 (Health Level 7). PDSG also offers Vigilys, a software product that leverages data accessed by CDX and provides a shared, map-based, common operating picture that allows field based first responders and office based emergency managers the ability to visualize incident responses and collaborate in real-time. PDSG's technological innovation is backed by subject matter expertise and proven methodologies, facilitating the rapid exchange of actionable data in mission-critical applications such as clinical quality improvement and emergency services response management.
PDSG has been working with some of the nation's earliest and most innovative data exchange projects including one of the most advanced statewide data-sharing initiatives to be deployed in the United States. PDSG is the data-sharing group of Patriot Scientific Corporation, which is headquartered in Carlsbad, California (OTC BB:PTSC). For more information on Patriot Data Solutions Group, visit www.pdsg.com.
Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: Statements in this news release looking forward in time involve risks and uncertainties, including the risks associated with the effect of changing economic conditions, trends in the products markets, variations in the company's cash flow, market acceptance risks, patent litigation, technical development risks, seasonality and other risk factors detailed in the company's Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
Contact:
Patriot Investor Relations
ir@ptsc.com
760-547-2700 ext. 102
SOURCE Patriot Scientific Corporation Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 21 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm
ATLANTA, July 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- TRX, Inc. (www.trx.com) (Other OTC: TRXI), a world-leading provider of travel technology, process automation, consulting and data services, today announced that Trip Davis, Co-Founder and Chairman, TRX, Inc., will moderate the Travel's Value Chain CEO Panel at the NBTA International Convention & Exposition, Monday, August 9, 11:40 a.m. in Houston, immediately preceding the General Session and luncheon with Condoleezza Rice.
The panel will provide a glimpse into the future of the corporate travel business from the CEO perspective. CEOs will address the impact of economic recovery, evolving business models, and industry innovations on the corporate travel supply chain. Panelists include:
Carlson Wagonlit Travel President and CEO: Douglas AndersonSouthwest Airlines Chairman of the Board, President, and CEO: Gary KellyStarwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. President and CEO: Frits van PaasschenTravelport GDS President and CEO: Gordon WilsonModerator: Trip Davis, Co-Founder and Chairman, TRX, Inc.NBTA President and CEO, Craig Banikowski, CCTE, C.P.M., CMM, said, "NBTA is honored that Trip accepted the role as moderator for this break-through panel that will offer insights from the corner office on how business models are evolving in the travel supply chain. As a proven, engaging speaker and well-respected industry leader, Trip will help steer the discussion in a direction that is sure to provide attendees and panelists, alike, with a look at what travel buyers and suppliers can expect from Travel's Value Chain in the coming months and beyond."
"NBTA's annual convention is the largest and most influential event of the year in corporate travel. It's a 'mecca' for thought leadership, and I am excited to moderate the discussion with the CEOs of four iconic travel companies," said Davis. "I believe that we're experiencing an inflexion point in corporate travel related to both macroeconomics and microeconomics. This panel discussion will provide many important perspectives on the new travel value chain - our industry's new normal."
Davis is recognized as a dynamic industry leader and contributor. In 2007 and 2002, Business Travel News recognized him as one of the Top 25 influential executives in the travel industry. He is a six-time Chairman of the Masters Program, the premier executive forum for corporate travel industry leaders. In 2005, the National Business Travel Association (NBTA) voted Davis its Allied Member of the Year. Three times, Travel Agent Magazine has listed him as one of the 100 Rising Stars in the travel industry.
Davis co-founded TRX in December 1999 and served as the President and CEO for nine years. Davis was named Chairman of the Board in December 2008. TRX processes over $400 billion per year in travel volume on behalf of its clients, including transaction data from over 400 sources in 50 countries. Based in Atlanta, the company employs 800 people in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and India.
For more information about the 2010 NBTA Convention, visit www.nbtaconvention.org.
About NBTA
The National Business Travel Association (NBTA) is the world's premier business travel and corporate meetings organization. NBTA and its regional affiliates - NBTA Asia Pacific, the Brazilian Business Travel Association (ABGEV), NBTA Canada, NBTA Mexico, and NBTA USA - serve a network of more than 15,000 business travel professionals around the globe with industry-leading events, networking, education & professional development, research, news & information, and advocacy. NBTA members, numbering more than 4,000 in 30 nations, are corporate and government travel and meetings managers, as well as travel service providers. They collectively manage and direct more than US$200 billion of global business travel and meetings expenditures annually on behalf of more than 10 million business travelers within their organizations. For more information, visit www.nbta.org
About TRX
TRX is a world-leading travel technology and data services provider offering more than 20 software-as-a-service utilities for online booking, reservation processing, data intelligence, and process automation. We deliver our technology applications in an on-demand environment to travel agencies, corporations, travel suppliers, government agencies, credit card associations, credit card issuing banks, and third-party administrators. We provide patented savings maximization solutions via our travel analytics consulting practice, extending spend management services to travel buyers all over the world. We complement all of these offerings with a global workforce focused on travel process automation and re-engineering. For more information about TRX or to contact a TRX sales office, phone 404.929.6100 or visit the company's Web site at www.trx.com.
SOURCE TRX, Inc. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 21 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm
Oh, what could have been. Rahul Sood, of Voodoo PC fame (now at HP), says he’s heard from people in the know that Microsoft was working on a project that would have integrated Xbox Live with a sort of Windows Live. The end goal was to have been console gamers and PC gamers playing against each other on a combined Xbox Live+Windows Live service. The reason why this project never saw the light of day? Because console gamers are rubbish.
What happened was that the combined service, or whatever you want to call it, was moving along smoothly, even getting to the testing stages. That is, testing between console gamers over here and PC gamers over there. Console gamers would be using their standard controller and PC gamers would be using their standard mouse and keyboard.
Every single time the PC gamer killed the console gamer. And I don’t mean killed as in “fragged,” but killed as in the PC gamer knocked the teeth out of the console gamers every single time.
So partially for this reason—console gamers didn’t stand a chance against PC gamers—that Microsoft decided to kill the project. Maybe that’s good (would PC gaming be more popular today?), maybe that’s bad (would PC gamers have to put up with 12-year-olds screaming stupid nonsense at the top of their lungs all game long?). Who knows.
Now, this could be saying a few ones. One is obvious: a mouse and keyboard is more precise than any console controller. That’s not disputable, right? I should hope not! Two, it could be saying something about the relative skill level of PC and console gamers. Can you name even one “famous” professional console gamer? I certainly cannot, but I know you’ve heard the name Fatal1ty before. Perhaps PC gamers are simply better at gaming then their console counterparts?
Then again, it could simply be function following form. PC games (that’s from-the-ground-up PC games, not mere ports) are usually more complex than console games, so after years of getting used to playing, say, Eve Online (or name-your-complex-game), they’ve developed better skills?
No one is saying that PC gamers are “better” than console gamers, just that maybe they have a higher developed skill-set thanks to a more precise input method and generally harder games. Please don’t throw pointy things at me.
While some publishers eye the Apple iPad hopefully as way of migrating the print experience into a rich, multimedia domain as never before, others are already leaping over paper entirely to reach new readers with original digital publications.
The veteran Mars Odyssey satellite has switched itself into "safe mode" after detecting a problem with an electronic encoder responsible for controlling the orientation of the spacecraft's solar array. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jul 2010 | 2:31 pm
Plant scientists at the John Innes Centre have provided a new solution to an old debate on why species hybrids can be more vigourous than their parents. In a study to be published online next week in the online open access journal PLoS Biology, the researchers found a type of genetic "noise" caused by a surprising degree of variation in gene activity even for highly similar traits in closely related species. They found that when species hybridise, some of the variation in gene activity may be cancelled out, leading to greater vigour.Enrico Coen and colleagues analysed the trait that causes flower asymmetry in two closely related species of snapdragon. They measured the activity of two relevant genes and its effect on the trait. The "noise" or variation they identified only has a very minor effect on a species for any single gene, but the collective effect for many genes could be substantial, reducing overall species performance. They suggest that natural selection may be unable to eliminate the noise they identified. Hybridisation, however, might partly eliminate the noise."This is the first study that analyses the consequences of variations in gene expression on conserved traits in closely related species," said Professor Coen, from the John Innes Centre.The results show that hybrids might be expected to exhibit increased performance in basic traits such as growth. However, they also show that in the longer term, other traits such as those involved in sexual reproduction might be expected to perform less well, accounting for reduced fertility of hybrids."Gene expression levels are free to drift around during evolution within particular bounds," said Professor Coen. "But the cumulative effects of variation explain the conflicting phenomena of hybrid superiority and inferiority."This explanation of hybrid vigour covers natural species as well as domesticated varieties. The findings avoid some of the pitfalls of previous explanations."Breeders already know there is no magic hybrid vigour gene, otherwise they would have used it by now," said Professor Coen. "What our study shows is how and why hybridisation can have such a strong impact on performance," said Professor Coen.---On the Net:Public Library of SciencePLoS Biology Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 21 Jul 2010 | 2:30 pm
ANAHEIM, Calif., July 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Multi-Fineline Electronix, Inc. (Nasdaq: MFLX), a leading global provider of high-quality, technologically advanced flexible printed circuit and value-added component assembly solutions to the electronics industry, today announced preliminary financial results for the third quarter of fiscal 2010 ended June 30, 2010, along with its current outlook for the fourth quarter.
The Company expects to report net sales in the third quarter of approximately $181 million, an increase of approximately 3.7 percent from net sales of $174.5 million in the same period last year. Gross margin during the third quarter of fiscal 2010 is expected to be approximately 12.3 percent, compared to 14.3 percent for the same period in the prior year. The Company expects to announce final third quarter results in its regularly scheduled press release and conference call on August 5, 2010, at which time it will provide further comments on the quarter. Details for the call will be announced shortly.
Reza Meshgin, Chief Executive Officer of MFLEX, commented, "Our net sales performance in the third quarter was solid due to continued strong demand for our flex assemblies for smartphones and other consumer electronic devices. As anticipated, growth in the quarter was driven by several new programs with existing OEM customers. While ambitious manufacturing and quality improvement initiatives implemented over the last year have helped to improve our operational performance in the initial ramp of new programs, during the third quarter we experienced lower yields than expected mostly due to the complicated nature of one new program. The lower than expected gross margin of 12.3 percent reflects the impact of these lower yields along with a more competitive pricing environment."
In addition, the Company expects that third quarter net income will be impacted by impairment and restructuring costs and non-cash income tax expenses associated with the consolidation of operations. These costs are expected to range between $3.5 and $4.0 million net of taxes. These actions are expected to improve the Company's cost structure in future periods.
Fourth Quarter Outlook
For the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010, the Company currently expects net sales to increase sharply and range between $220 and $240 million. Gross margin is currently expected to range between 13 and 15 percent based on the projected product mix.
Commenting on the Company's business outlook, Mr. Meshgin noted, "The continued ramp of new programs is expected to support another quarter of strong net sales and drive full year net sales growth in fiscal 2010. Gross margins are expected to benefit from the higher projected manufacturing volumes in the fourth quarter. This should more than offset the residual gross margin pressure from the new program ramps along with start-up costs related to MFC3, our new state-of-the art manufacturing facility in China."
About MFLEX
MFLEX (www.mflex.com) is a global provider of high-quality, technologically advanced flexible printed circuit and value-added component assembly solutions to the electronics industry. The Company is one of a limited number of manufacturers that provides a seamless, integrated end-to-end flexible printed circuit solution for customers, ranging from design and application engineering, prototyping and high-volume manufacturing to turnkey component assembly and testing. The Company targets its solutions within the electronics market and, in particular, focuses on applications where flexible printed circuits are the enabling technology in achieving a desired size, shape, weight or functionality of an electronic device. Current applications for the Company's products include mobile phones and smart mobile devices, medical devices, computer/data storage, portable bar code scanners and other handheld consumer electronic devices. MFLEX's common stock is quoted on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol MFLX.
Certain statements in this news release are forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements and predictions regarding: revenues; net sales; sales; full year net sales growth projections; net income; operating expenses; profitability; impairment and restructuring costs; non-cash income tax expenses; gross margin, including factors that could affect gross margin; yields; labor productivity and operating efficiencies; demand for smartphones and other consumer electronic devices; the Company's competitive position; current and upcoming programs, product mix and the material content and ramping thereof; and the Company's manufacturing capabilities, capacity and ability to ramp/expand production of flex and flex assemblies and capacity. Additional forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements pertaining to other financial items, plans, strategies or objectives of management for future operations, the Company's future operations and financial condition or prospects, and any other statement that is not historical fact, including any statement which is preceded by the words "assume," "should," "can," "will," "plan," "scheduled," "expect," "estimate," "aim," "intend," "project," "foresee," "target," "anticipate," "may," "believe," "future," or similar words. Actual events or results may differ materially from those stated or implied by the Company's forward-looking statements as a result of a variety of factors including the effect of the economy or seasonality on the demand for electronic devices, the Company's success with new and current customers and those customers' success in the marketplace, the Company's ability to develop and deliver new technologies, pricing of the Company's products, the Company's ability to diversify its customer base and markets, the Company's effectiveness in managing manufacturing processes, the ramp up of new programs and costs and expansion of its operations, the Company's ability to manage quality assurance issues and yields, the degree to which the Company is able to utilize current and future manufacturing capacity, enter into new markets and execute its strategic plans, the impact of competition, pricing pressures and technological advances, the Company's efficiencies and effectiveness of location strategy for the Company's workforce and operations, electricity and component shortages and other risks detailed from time to time in the Company's SEC reports, including its Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2010. These forward-looking statements represent management's judgment as of the date of this news release. The Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements.
SOURCE Multi-Fineline Electronix, Inc. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 21 Jul 2010 | 2:30 pm
AMES, Iowa, July 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Sauer-Danfoss Inc. (NYSE: SHS) announced that it will be holding a conference call on August 5, 2010, at 10:00 AM Eastern time. The purpose of the call will be to discuss second quarter 2010 results. The Company will release second quarter results the previous day, after the close of markets.
The call is open to all interested parties on listen-only mode via an audio webcast and can be accessed through the Investor Relations page of the Company's website at http://ir.sauer-danfoss.com. A replay of the call will be available at that site through August 19, 2010. If you would like to participate in the live conference call so that you may ask questions, please contact us for the call-in number.
About Sauer-Danfoss
Sauer-Danfoss Inc. is a worldwide leader in the design, manufacture, and sale of engineered hydraulic, electric and electronic systems and components for use primarily in applications of mobile equipment. Sauer-Danfoss, with 2009 revenues of approximately $1.2 billion, has sales, manufacturing, and engineering capabilities in Europe, the Americas, and the Asia-Pacific region.
More details online at www.sauer-danfoss.com.
SOURCE Sauer-Danfoss Inc. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 21 Jul 2010 | 2:30 pm
BEIJING, July 21 /PRNewswire-Asia/ -- Baidu, Inc. (Nasdaq: BIDU), the
leading Chinese language Internet search provider, today announced its
unaudited financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2010(1).
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081103/BAIDULOGO )
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081103/BAIDULOGO )
Second Quarter 2010 Highlights
-- Total revenues in the second quarter of 2010 were RMB1.914 billion
($282.3 million), a 74.4% increase from the corresponding period in
2009.
-- Operating profit in the second quarter of 2010 was RMB971.8 million
($143.3 million), a 129.8% increase from the corresponding period in
2009.
-- Net income in the second quarter of 2010 was RMB837.4 million ($123.5
million), a 118.5% increase from the corresponding period in 2009.
Diluted earnings per ADS(2) for the second quarter of 2010 was RMB2.40
($0.35); diluted earnings per ADS excluding share-based compensation
expenses (non-GAAP) for the second quarter of 2010 was RMB2.46 ($0.36).
(1) This announcement contains translations of certain RMB amounts into
U.S. dollars at specified rates solely for the convenience of the
reader. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from RMB to U.S.
dollars are made at a rate of RMB6.7815 to US$1.00, the effective noon
buying rate as of June 30, 2010 in The City of New York for cable
transfers of RMB as certified for customs purposes by the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York.
(2) Effective on May 12, 2010, Baidu adjusted the ratio of its American
depositary shares ("ADSs") representing Class A ordinary shares from
one (1) ADS for one (1) share to ten (10) ADSs for one (1) share. All
earnings per ADS figures in this announcement give effect to the
forgoing ADS to share ratio change.
"Baidu's record top and bottom line results reflect the healthy growth of
our customer base and continued improvements in monetization efficiency," said
Robin Li, Baidu's chairman and chief executive officer. "This quarter's strong
performance also underscores the vast Internet market opportunities for us and
the growing appreciation for search engine marketing in China."
Mr. Li added, "Baidu continues to focus on user experience and has many
initiatives on this front to ensure Baidu remains at the center of China's
Internet ecosystem."
Jennifer Li, Baidu's chief financial officer, commented, "Effective
execution resulted in impressive revenue growth and healthy margin
improvements for second quarter 2010. Over the next quarters, we will continue
to aggressively invest in R&D, sales and infrastructure to drive innovation,
enhance monetization and support our growth."
Second Quarter 2010 Results
Baidu reported total revenues of RMB1.914 billion ($282.3 million) for the
second quarter of 2010, representing a 74.4% increase from the corresponding
period in 2009.
Online marketing revenues for the second quarter of 2010 were RMB1.913
billion ($282.2 million), representing a 74.5% increase from the corresponding
period in 2009. Baidu had about 254,000 active online marketing customers in
the second quarter of 2010, representing a 25.1% increase from the
corresponding period in 2009 and a 14.9% increase from the previous quarter.
Revenue per online marketing customer for the second quarter was approximately
RMB7,500 ($1,106), a 38.9% increase from the corresponding period in 2009 and
a 27.1% increase from the previous quarter.
Traffic acquisition cost (TAC) as a component of cost of revenues was
RMB185.6 million ($27.4 million), representing 9.7% of total revenues, as
compared to 16.0% in the corresponding period in 2009 and 13.2% in the first
quarter of 2010. The decrease in TAC as a percentage of total revenues is
primarily due to the quality improvement of Baidu Union traffic.
Bandwidth costs as a component of cost of revenues were RMB67.9 million
($10.0 million), representing 3.5% of total revenues, compared to 4.6% in the
corresponding period in 2009. Depreciation costs as a component of cost of
revenues were RMB83.6 million ($12.3 million), representing 4.4% of total
revenues, compared to 5.5% in the corresponding period in 2009.
Selling, general and administrative expenses were RMB265.0 million ($39.1
million), representing an increase of 47.1% from the corresponding period in
2009, primarily due to increased headcount cost and marketing expenses.
Research and development expenses were RMB159.3 million ($23.5 million), a
66.2% increase from the corresponding period in 2009. The increase was
primarily due to increased R&D personnel expenses.
Share-based compensation expenses, which were allocated to related
operating costs and expense line items, were RMB21.6 million ($3.2 million) in
the second quarter of 2010, compared to RMB19.5 million in the previous
quarter and RMB22.9 million in the corresponding period in 2009.
Operating profit was RMB971.8 million ($143.3 million), representing a
129.8% increase from the corresponding period in 2009. Operating profit
excluding share-based compensation expenses (non-GAAP) was RMB 993.4 million
($146.5 million), a 122.9% increase from the corresponding period in 2009.
Income tax expense was RMB140.5 million ($20.7 million), compared to an
income tax expense of RMB51.1 million in the corresponding period in 2009. The
effective tax rate for the second quarter of 2010 was 14.4% as compared to
12.8% in the previous quarter and 11.8% for the corresponding period in 2009.
The increase in effective tax rate was due to a new tax circular issued in the
second quarter resulting in changes to the applicable tax for one of our
subsidiaries in China.
Net income was RMB837.4 million ($123.5 million), representing a 118.5%
increase from the corresponding period in 2009. Basic and diluted earnings per
ADS for the second quarter of 2010 amounted to RMB2.41 ($0.36) and RMB2.40
($0.35), respectively.
Net income excluding share-based compensation expenses (non-GAAP) was
RMB859.0 million ($126.7 million), a 111.5% increase from the corresponding
period in 2009. Basic and diluted earnings per ADS excluding share-based
compensation expenses (non-GAAP) for the second quarter of 2010 amounted to
RMB2.47 ($0.36) and RMB2.46 ($0.36), respectively.
As of June 30, 2010, the Company had cash, cash equivalents and short-term
investments of RMB5.913 billion ($872.0 million). Net operating cash inflow
and capital expenditures for the second quarter of 2010 were RMB1.240 billion
($182.8 million) and RMB181.6 million ($26.8 million), respectively.
Adjusted EBITDA (non-GAAP), defined in this announcement as earnings
before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, other non-operating income
and share-based compensation expenses, was RMB1.104 billion ($162.8 million)
for the second quarter of 2010, representing a 112.0% increase from the
corresponding period in 2009.
Outlook for Third Quarter 2010
Baidu currently expects to generate total revenues in an amount ranging
from RMB2.200 billion ($324.4 million) to RMB2.260 billion ($333.3 million)
for the third quarter of 2010, representing a 72% to 77% year-over-year
increase. This forecast reflects Baidu's current and preliminary view, which
is subject to change.
Conference Call Information
Baidu's management will hold an earnings conference call at 8:00 PM on
July 21, 2010 U.S. Eastern Time (8:00 AM on July 22, 2010 Beijing/Hong Kong
time).
Dial-in details for the earnings conference call are as follows:
US: +1.857.350.1676
UK: +44.207.365.8426
Hong Kong: +852.3002.1672
Passcode for all regions: 91851178
A replay of the conference call may be accessed by phone at the following
number until July 28, 2010:
International: +1.617.801.6888
Passcode: 25736168
Additionally, a live and archived webcast of this conference call will be
available at http://ir.baidu.com .
About Baidu
Baidu, Inc. is the leading Chinese language Internet search provider. As a
technology-based media company, Baidu aims to provide the best way for people
to find information. In addition to serving individual Internet search users,
Baidu provides an effective platform for businesses to reach potential
customers. Baidu's ADSs currently trade on the NASDAQ Global Select Market
under the symbol "BIDU". Each of Baidu's Class A ordinary shares is
represented by 10 ADSs.
Safe Harbor Statement
This announcement contains forward-looking statements. These statements
are made under the "safe harbor" provisions of the U.S. Private Securities
Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements can be
identified by terminology such as "will," "expects," "anticipates," "future,"
"intends," "plans," "believes," "estimates," "confident" and similar
statements. Among other things, the outlook for the third quarter 2010 and
quotations from management in this announcement, as well as Baidu's strategic
and operational plans, contain forward-looking statements. Baidu may also make
written or oral forward-looking statements in its periodic reports to the U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission, in its annual report to shareholders, in
press releases and other written materials and in oral statements made by its
officers, directors or employees to fourth parties. Statements that are not
historical facts, including statements about Baidu's beliefs and expectations,
are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve inherent
risks and uncertainties. A number of factors could cause actual results to
differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statement,
including but not limited to the following: our growth strategies; our future
business development, including development of new products and services; our
ability to attract and retain users and customers; competition in the Chinese
and Japanese language Internet search markets; competition for online
marketing customers; changes in our revenues and certain cost or expense items
as a percentage of our revenues; the outcome of ongoing, or any future,
litigation or arbitration, including those relating to intellectual property
rights; the expected growth of the Chinese language Internet search market and
the number of Internet and broadband users in China; Chinese governmental
policies relating to the Internet and Internet search providers and general
economic conditions in China, Japan and elsewhere. Further information
regarding these and other risks is included in our annual report on Form 20-F
and other documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Baidu
does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statement,
except as required under applicable law. All information provided in this
press release and in the attachments is as of July 21, 2010, and Baidu
undertakes no duty to update such information, except as required under
applicable law.
About Non-GAAP Financial Measures
To supplement Baidu's consolidated financial results presented in
accordance with GAAP, Baidu uses the following measures defined as non-GAAP
financial measures by the SEC: adjusted EBITDA, operating profit excluding
share-based compensation expenses, net income excluding share-based
compensation expenses, and basic and diluted earnings per ADS excluding
share-based compensation expenses. The presentation of these non-GAAP
financial measures is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a
substitute for the financial information prepared and presented in accordance
with GAAP. For more information on these non-GAAP financial measures, please
see the tables captioned "Reconciliations of non-GAAP results of operations
measures to the nearest comparable GAAP measures" and "Reconciliation from net
cash provided by operating activities to adjusted EBITDA" set forth at the end
of this release.
Baidu believes that these non-GAAP financial measures provide meaningful
supplemental information regarding its performance and liquidity by excluding
certain expenses, particularly share-based compensation expenses, that may not
be indicative of its operating performance or financial condition from a cash
perspective. We believe that both management and investors benefit from
referring to these non-GAAP financial measures in assessing our performance
and when planning and forecasting future periods. These non-GAAP financial
measures also facilitate management's internal comparisons to Baidu's
historical performance and liquidity. Baidu has computed its non-GAAP
financial measures using the same consistent method from quarter to quarter
since April 1, 2006. We believe these non-GAAP financial measures are useful
to investors in allowing for greater transparency with respect to supplemental
information used by management in its financial and operational decision
making. A limitation of using these non-GAAP financial measures is that these
non-GAAP measures exclude share-based compensation charge that has been and
will continue to be for the foreseeable future a significant recurring expense
in our results of operations. A limitation of using non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA
is that it does not include all items that impact our net income for the
period. Management compensates for these limitations by providing specific
information regarding the GAAP amounts excluded from each non-GAAP measure.
The accompanying tables have more details on the reconciliations between GAAP
financial measures that are most directly comparable to the non-GAAP financial
measures.
For investor and media inquiries, please contact:
China
Victor Tseng
Baidu, Inc.
Phone: +86-10-5992-7244
Email: ir@baidu.com
Cynthia He
Brunswick Group LLC
Phone: +86-10-6566-2256
Email: che@brunswickgroup.com
U.S.
Ms. Kate Tellier
Brunswick Group LLC
Phone: +1-212-333-3810
Email: ktellier@brunswickgroup.com
Baidu, Inc.
Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets
June 30, December 31, June 30,
(in RMB thousands) 2010 2009 2009
Unaudited Audited Unaudited
ASSETS
Current assets:
Cash and cash equivalents 4,154,849 4,199,889 2,918,670
Short-term investments 1,758,412 381,149 435,624
Accounts receivable, net 198,867 161,610 134,405
Other assets, current 113,393 91,067 83,031
Deferred tax assets, net 14,413 9,157 11,168
Total current assets 6,239,934 4,842,872 3,582,898
Non-current assets:
Fixed assets, net 1,152,685 997,557 801,359
Intangible assets, net 117,562 122,595 120,079
Goodwill 63,691 63,691 54,082
Long-term investments, net 53,057 14,308 12,295
Deferred tax assets, net 33,799 33,799 27,679
Other assets, non-current 119,483 82,153 71,237
Total non-current assets 1,540,277 1,314,103 1,086,731
TOTAL ASSETS 7,780,211 6,156,975 4,669,629
LIABILITIES AND SHAREHOLDERS' EQUITY
Current liabilities:
Accounts payable and accrued
liabilities, current 888,343 749,861 485,161
Customer advances and deposits,
current 716,866 607,828 406,044
Deferred revenue 45,760 42,035 9,167
Total current liabilities 1,650,969 1,399,724 900,372
Non-current liabilities:
Long-term payable for business
acquisition 4,150 4,150 --
Deferred Income, non-current 5,000 -- --
Total non-current liabilities 9,150 4,150 --
Total liabilities 1,660,119 1,403,874 900,372
Shareholders' equity
Class A Ordinary Shares, Par value
US$0.00005 per share, 825,000,000
shares authorized, and 26,298,960
shares and 26,585,811 shares issued
and outstanding as at December 31,
2009 and June 30, 2010 11 11 11
Class B Ordinary Shares, Par value
US$0.00005 per share, 35,400,000
shares authorized, and 8,454,332
shares and 8,214,332 shares issued
and outstanding as at December 31,
2009 and June 30, 2010 4 4 4
Additional paid-in capital 1,477,570 1,426,070 1,364,543
Accumulated other comprehensive
loss (115,923) (113,513) (115,104)
Retained earnings 4,758,430 3,440,529 2,519,803
Total shareholders' equity 6,120,092 4,753,101 3,769,257
TOTAL LIABILITIES AND SHAREHOLDERS'
EQUITY 7,780,211 6,156,975 4,669,629
Baidu, Inc.
Condensed Consolidated Statements of Income
For the Three Months Ended
(in RMB thousands except for share, June 30, June 30, March 31,
per share information) 2010 2009 2010
Unaudited Unaudited Unaudited
Revenues:
Online marketing services 1,913,467 1,096,624 1,293,396
Other services 927 845 519
Total revenues 1,914,394 1,097,469 1,293,915
Operating costs and expenses:
Cost of revenues (note 1, 2) (518,336) (398,591) (426,405)
Selling, general and
administrative (note 2) (265,003) (180,204) (214,568)
Research and development (note 2) (159,271) (95,853) (122,129)
Total operating costs and expenses (942,610) (674,648) (763,102)
Operating profit 971,784 422,821 530,813
Other income:
Interest income 15,069 7,588 11,374
Exchange loss, net (23) (1) (1)
Gain and loss from equity method
investments 243 -- 247
Other income, net (9,201) 3,913 8,797
Total other income 6,088 11,500 20,417
Income before income taxes 977,872 434,321 551,230
Income taxes (140,508) (51,061) (70,693)
Net income 837,364 383,260 480,537
Earnings per share for Class A and
Class B ordinary shares:
Basic 24.07 11.09 13.82
Diluted 23.98 11.02 13.77
Earnings per ADS (1 Class A ordinary
share=10 ADSs):
Basic 2.41 1.11 1.38
Diluted 2.40 1.10 1.38
Weighted average aggregate number of
Class A and Class B ordinary shares
outstanding:
Basic 34,794,808 34,571,453 34,766,823
Diluted 34,912,940 34,785,181 34,894,049
(1) Cost of revenues are detailed as
follows:
Business tax and surcharges (121,627) (67,877) (81,301)
Traffic acquisition costs (185,642) (175,445) (171,349)
Bandwidth costs (67,927) (50,050) (58,012)
Depreciation costs (83,627) (60,106) (65,888)
Operational costs (57,743) (43,472) (48,256)
Share-based compensation expenses (1,770) (1,641) (1,599)
Total cost of revenues (518,336) (398,591) (426,405)
(2) Includes share-based compensation
expenses as follows:
Cost of revenues (1,770) (1,641) (1,599)
Selling, general and administrative (9,064) (10,912) (8,593)
Research and development (10,757) (10,332) (9,339)
Total share-based compensation
expenses (21,591) (22,885) (19,531)
Reconciliations of non-GAAP results of operations measures to the nearest
comparable GAAP measures (*) (in RMB thousands, unaudited)
Three months ended June 30, 2009
GAAP Result Adjustment Non-GAAP Results
Operating profit 422,821 22,885 445,706
Three months ended June 30, 2009
GAAP Result Adjustment Non-GAAP Results
Net income 383,260 22,885 406,145
Three months ended March 31, 2010
GAAP Result Adjustment Non-GAAP Results
Operating profit 530,813 19,531 550,344
Three months ended March 31, 2010
GAAP Result Adjustment Non-GAAP Results
Net income 480,537 19,531 500,068
Three months ended June 30, 2010
GAAP Result Adjustment Non-GAAP Results
Operating profit 971,784 21,591 993,375
Three months ended June 30, 2010
GAAP Result Adjustment Non-GAAP Results
Net income 837,364 21,591 858,955
(*) The adjustment is only for share-based compensation.
Reconciliation from net cash provided by operating activities to adjusted
EBITDA(*) (in RMB thousands, unaudited)
Three Three Three
months As a months As a months As a
ended % of ended % of ended % of
June 30, total March 31, total June 30, total
2009 revenues 2010 revenues 2010 revenues
Net cash provided
by operating
activities 519,052 47% 432,169 33% 1,239,850 65%
Changes in assets
and liabilities,
net of effects of
acquisitions (37,741) -3% 158,711 12% (270,138) -14%
Income taxes
expenses 51,061 5% 70,693 5% 140,508 7%
Interest income
and other, net (11,500) -1% (20,417) -2% (6,088) 0%
Adjusted EBITDA 520,872 48% 641,156 48% 1,104,132 58%
(*) Definition of adjusted EBITDA: earnings before interest, taxes,
depreciation, amortization, other non-operating income, and
share-based compensation expenses.
SOURCE Baidu, Inc. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 21 Jul 2010 | 2:30 pm
How species form and what keeps them distinct from each other, even though they can interbreed, is a key question in evolution. Researchers from Taiwan, led by Dr. Jun-Yi Leu, an Assistant Research Fellow from the Institute of Molecular Biology at Academia Sinica, have recently identified genes in three closely-related yeast species that cause sterility, increasing our understanding of how species can remain distinct. The findings will be published next week in the online, open access journal PLoS Biology.If one species mates with another, the hybrids produced often die or are unable to reproduce. Such hybrids can provide clues about the process of speciation. At the molecular level, one cause of the inability of hybrids to reproduce (reproductive isolation) results from a mismatch between genes, which prevents those genes functioning properly. There are various types of such genetic incompatibility, one of which is a mismatch between genes in the nucleus and those in the mitochondrion (a vital organelle playing a key role in cell respiration, the process by which cells produce energy).In a previous study, the same team had observed that a nuclear-mitochondrial mismatch caused hybrid sterility between two yeast species. In this study, Dr. Leu and his colleagues attempted to determine whether cytonuclear incompatibility is a common cause of reproductive isolation in yeasts. They investigated hybrids of baker's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) crossed with two other yeast species - either S. bayanus or S. paradoxus. They revealed that most of the hybrid spores were respiration-deficient, indicating cytonuclear incompatibility. The researchers then went on to identify that the gene MRS1, which encodes a protein (Mrs1) required to remove an intron from the mitochondrial COX1 gene, and the gene AIM22, which encodes a ligase required for mitochondrial protein lipoylation were responsible for the mismatch.To trace how this incompatibility evolved, they found that changes in three amino acids are sufficient to make Mrs1 incompatible in hybrids. In addition, the functional change of Mrs1 is accompanied by a change of COX1 introns, indicating a coevolutionary relationship."Our results suggest that cytonuclear incompatibility can be achieved by multiple molecular mechanisms and it potentially represents a general mechanism of reproductive isolation in yeast species," said Dr. Leu. "It will be interesting to see whether such mitochondrial-nuclear incompatibility is also involved reproductive isolation in other organisms," he added.---On the Net:Public Library of SciencePLoS Biology Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 21 Jul 2010 | 2:18 pm
I swear it seems everyday there is a new leak, new rumor, or new tip regarding the Motorola Droid 2. Motorola has a terrible track record of keeping its phones under wraps, especially with the Motorola Droid X. For example, just yesterday we saw a picture of the Droid 2 confirming it will operate on Android 2.2 out of the box. This is great news because every Android smartphone owner can’t wait until their respective manufacturer rolls out Android 2.2. Today, it seems the Motorola Droid 2 might launch on August 12, which is eleven days earlier than the rumored release date.
Engadget is citing “trusted source” that Verizon will run a soft launch initially and when the media campaign begins to run on all cylinders, the Droid 2 will fully launch on August 23. In addition, there is a possibility Verizon and Motorola will market a special edition Droid 2 which would feature R2-D2 on the back. Well folks, I would be prepared by August 12 for a possible Droid 2 launch and I believe the latest date for a launch will be August 23. Hopefully we will see something official from Verizon/Motorola in the coming days.
A chance discovery has led Australian scientists to question key assumptions about how our vision works.Their results show the brain is more flexible and versatile than the computer it is often likened to, and even may lead to new tests for blinding diseases such as glaucoma.Previously it was thought that the brain’s ability to discern color depends on a specialized nerve ‘color channel’, but now, say researchers from The Vision Centre and Sydney University, it appears some color-sensing cells can also signal movement.“In this research we discovered that blue sensing cells not only can respond to black and white patterns, but surprisingly are even sensitive to the direction of pattern movement,” explains team leader Professor Paul Martin.“In diseases like glaucoma, your color vision is impaired. Now we have discovered that the color cells can also sense black and white and movement, that gives us a new way of testing to see if the cells are healthy or not. Our colleagues in The Vision Centre include experts at designing tests for glaucoma, and they now have a new clue that may make their tests even more sensitive,” he adds.The serendipitous finding happened when young researcher Maziar Hashemi-Nezhad decided to carry out an unplanned experiment that came up with a totally unexpected result.“It was chance. Maziar was in the lab, late at night, and decided to see if he could get color vision cells to respond to a moving black and white pattern – something which was considered most unlikely because the prevailing scientific view was they respond only to color. He saw an immediate response,” Prof Martin says.“This is an example of how ‘blue sky’ science may lead to a practical outcome. The goal of this work is not to study glaucoma, it is really all about trying to interpret the signals on the ‘fax line’ that connects the eyes to the brain – this discovery takes us one small step closer to understanding what is really going down the fax line,” he explains.“For a long time we’ve had an image of the brain as a kind of computer, with particular pathways – or ‘wires’- for particular nerve signals. Now it is becoming clear the wiring is a lot less precise than a computer. But imprecise wiring is actually flexible because it creates many backup pathways to compensate for aging and damage,” Prof. Martin says.The researchers’ paper “Receptive field asymmetries produce color-dependent direction selectivity in primate lateral geniculate nucleus” by Chris Tailby, William Dobbie, Samuel Solomon, Brett Szmajda, Maziar Hashemi-Nezhad, Jason Forte and Paul Martin has just appeared in the Journal of Vision (2010), Volume 10 (8), pages 1-18.The Vision Centre is funded by the Australian Research Council as the ARC Centre of Excellence in Vision Science.---On the Net:ScinewsJournal of Vision Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 21 Jul 2010 | 1:55 pm
The site of Jesus' baptism is dangerously contaminated, according to an advisory that urges tourists to stay out of the river's waters. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jul 2010 | 1:55 pm
This is part of our summer series of new Search Stories. Look for the label Search Stories and subscribe to the series. -Ed.
My sister is my best friend in the world. But that wasn’t always the case. When we were young, my sister and I always had our sibling rivalries. Quarrels over who got more (or fewer) birthday presents, ongoing debates around whose week it was to walk the dog and your average diary lock-picking weren’t uncommon. But now that we've grown older, it's become clear that those moments have brought us closer together, and today my sister is my best friend.
Our search story this week really struck a chord with me, and I’m excited to help introduce our latest video, “Brother and Sister.” It’s a fun, playful snapshot of an evolving sibling friendship. I hope you enjoy this week’s video as much as I did.
Posted by Bernardo Hernandez, Head of Consumer Marketing
SugarSync has announced an updated version of their BlackBerry app. This update brings the app up to version 1.5 and along with a new number comes support for streaming music files from the cloud to your BlackBerry.
“With the new version, people may stream non-DRM protected music - synced from their computers to the cloud – directly to their BlackBerry handheld device, and save local storage for favorite tunes, photos, videos, and more. The built-in music player enables people to play full sets, not just single songs.”
And while the streaming support was the big addition in this update, there was also support for email auto-complete added. As is stands the SugarSync app is available as a free download and can be found in the BlackBerry App World. In terms of the SugarSync account, you can go free and get 2GB of storage or up that to 30GB for $4.99 per month.
Shorter winters mean yellow-bellied marmots in Colorado now emerge 20 days earlier from their months-long hibernation than they did in the late '70s. So, more time to get fat over the summer and less fat-loss over the winter means a huge spike in their survival and reproductive success over the last decade. But this may not be all good news.
Seven months after Google launched its first phone, the HTC-designed Nexus One, it has stopped selling the devices through its online store.
“Sorry, folks…The Nexus One is no longer available for purchase directly from Google,” the company announced.
Google had warned users about this in May, saying it planned to wind down its web store.
Those who still want to buy a Nexus One will now have to go through Vodafone but that’s limited to some parts of Europe. Google promises it will make the device available to “registered developers” through a partner.
The Nexus One launched with what seemed like an innovative idea in the retailing of phones. Instead of being sold through stores, Google would directly sell it through the web to customers –something that worked for other consumer electronics products. However, the strategy didn’t resonate with consumers.
Potential customers found they couldn’t find a Nexus One in the real-world to play with, unless they knew a friend who already had the device. Google’s customer service support for the device also left many users unhappy.
Google has acknowledged that its retailing model with the Nexus One failed to catch on with consumers.
“While the global adoption of the Android platform has exceeded our expectations, the web store has not,” wrote Andy Rubin, vice-president of engineering and Android czar at Google in a blog post in May. “It’s remained a niche channel for early adopters.”
At the same time, Google tried to put the devices into retail stores in U.S. I wireless, a T-mobile affiliate, got Nexus One at its 250 stores mostly in the Midwest. So far, it hasn’t announced any other retail partnerships.
So is the Nexus One dead or is the Nexus One web retail experiment over? The answer to that will depend on whether Google will take the risk to launch a successor to the phone or if it will be content to let other handset makers take Android forward.
Skype has always sort of served as one of the poster children for why iOS just had to allow applications to run in the background. I mean, come on: being able to avoid gobbling up my precious minutes without having to keep the application open all the time just so I don’t miss calls? Yes. Yes please.
Its been a few weeks since iOS launched to the multitasking masses — and today, the dream of always-on Skype becomes a reality. Skype just pushed an update to their application which adds support for iOS 4’s multitasking abilities. Incoming call while the app isn’t in view? You’ll see a prompt, like the one above. Need to pop into another application while on a call? No problem — the Skype call will continue, just as a traditional carrier call would. Go Go Gadget App-Store-link!
Update: Even more good news! Remember how Skype was planning to start charging for Skype-to-Skype calls made over 3G? Yeah, they dropped that idea. You’ll still have to pay for SkypeOut if you’re making Skype-to-not-Skype calls, of course — but if you’re just calling another Skype user, you’re in the clear regardless of what network you’re on.
A new window into the deep past offers a glimpse into the future of the Antarctic Ice Sheet and rise of sea level around the world. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jul 2010 | 12:02 pm
A 33-year-long study shows that ground-dwelling squirrels are leaving hibernation earlier -- and eating more -- as the planet warms. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jul 2010 | 11:00 am
Motorola’s Droid X is hit among consumers, having sold out at most Verizon stores, but for some customers the phone’s display has been an issue.
Some Motorola’s Droid X phone users are experiencing flickering of their display, horizontal and vertical bands in it, and at times a blackout of the entire screen.
But those problems may be fixed soon, says Verizon.
Verizon has issued a statement to say only “a very small number” of users are facing the issue. And help for them is on the way.
“Motorola has resolved the issue and is continuing to ship the phones. Any consumer who experiences a flickering or banding display should contact a Motorola customer support center or Verizon Wireless,” a Verizon Wireless spokesperson told Engadget.
Motorola announced the Droid X on June 23 and the phone hit retail shelves on July 15. The $200 Droid X (after a $100 rebate and with a two-year Verizon contract) has a 4.3-inch screen and a 1 GHz processor. The phone launched with Android 2.1 operating system, but is expected to get an upgrade to Android 2.2 Froyo in the summer.
Droid X’s debut has left more than just users with display problems unhappy. Last week, Android geeks found that Motorola has made difficult for hackers to mod the Droid X by using a bootloader and chip combination that could potentially brick the phone if it is broken. Motorola has said that its combination of a specialized bootloader and custom “eFuse” chip will allow the phone to start up when approved software is installed, squashing hackers’ hopes that they can quickly get custom ROMs on the device.
Meanwhile, check out this video of a Droid X user whose phone screen started flickering after the device was woken up from its sleep mode.
RIM are clearly trying to keep your focus on their upcoming BlackBerry OS 6. We’ve seen two different videos already, as well as a bunch of phone leaks and screen shots.
And now, just for you guys, they’ve posted a whole heap more to their Inside BlackBerry blog.
You can see their updated camera app — which now includes facial recognition — their updated photo viewer, and other multimedia features like video podcasts and the new music player (you’ll have to go to their blog to see that screenshot, though).
I’ve never been a huge fan of BlackBerrys (BlackBerries?), but I gotta say, OS 6 looks pretty slick. It’s certainly a necessary upgrade, and I think you’ll agree with me that they’re doing a much better job of modernising their interface compared to, say, Nokia.
Attention wannabe supervillains: Putting your own, personal satellite into orbit is not such a far-fetched idea after all. Interorbital Systems, which makes rockets and spacecrafts, created a kit last year that lets almost anyone with a passion for electronics and space build a satellite. The $8,000 kit includes the price of the launch.
Nicolae Ceausescu, who ruled Romania with an iron fist for a quarter century, may not be buried at the grave bearing his name. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jul 2010 | 9:20 am
If you’re using both hands to play a musical instrument, the last thing you want to worry about is turning the pages of sheet-music as you play. The traditional solution was to make somebody do it for you, or to quickly reach up and do it yourself.
Tech has helped. These days a laptop with a USB foot-pedal is the way to go, but there have been all manner of spring-loaded and hydraulic contraptions invented to turn actual paper pages. These were, as you might expect, less than reliable.
Airturn, maker of sheet-music-reading software and hardware, has come up with a solution for the iPad. Apple’s tablet would seem to be the perfect device for reading music: it’s big enough to replace a piece of paper, whilst still slim and light enough to put on a music stand. Combined with Airturn’s new Bluetooth foot-switch, it makes a reliable, wire-free and practical solution.
The BT-105, as it is called, has a pair of switches, one to page forward, and one to page back. The switch doesn’t just work with the company’s own software, either. The video demo shows it controlling a third-party app with a zoom feature. In this case, the switch can tell the app to flip half a page at a time or, more accurately, to show the second half of the page before it flips to the next one.
The switch is in development right now, but should be available in the last quarter of this year.
There are a few competing keyboards on Android and the iPhone at the moment: Swype, Shapewriter, Swiftwkey — and that’s just the ones beginning with S. But here’s one that’s tackling a problem I never thought software could tackle: Blind Type makes it possible to type on your touch screen phone without looking at the screen.
You can do this because the Blind Type keyboard is no longer tethered to the bottom of your screen. In fact, you just type away anywhere on the screen — just like there was a keyboard underneath — and the app figures out what you meant.
Luckily for you, these guys have a video demonstration, coz I’m having a Dickens of a time trying to explain it to you. Do me favour and watch the video, won’t you?
While it’s not yet available, Blind Type are hoping to launch the keyboard on Android, iPhone, and iPad. If you’re keen (I know I am), make sure to keep an eye on their website for release details.
Unless you’re a musician from a 1980s new-romantic pop-group, or a girl, it’s unlikely that you’ll find Pavel Sidorenko’s tiny Pocket Mirror very useful. But for those who need to constantly reapply lipstick on-the-go, the flexible, wallet-friendly mirror is ideal.
The shiny steel back of my iPad Touch is getting too scratched to be useful when the Lady steals it to touch-up her make-up, so I may consider this €4 ($5) mirror as a generous birthday gift. The plastic mirror echoes the shape of a classic looking-glass, and being bendy, it won’t shatter when you sit down with it in your back pocket. The little handle also doubles as a tab that peeks out from the pockets of your billfold for quick, chivalrous removal.
The $5 price applies to customers in Estonia, from where it will be sent. Those in the rest of Europe will pay €5.50 ($7) and everyone else will have to come up with €6.50 ($8.40). Available now, not that you need any makeup, you handsome/beautiful thing, you.
The Tato is a $1,500 commuter with one added gimmick. Instead of schlepping a load on your back, on a rack or in a basket, you slide it into a slot in the frame itself. As you can see in the photo, the briefcase (or laptop-bag) sized cage is integrated, putting your luggage safely between your legs.
It’s a nice idea, although whether it is worth adding the weight of the extra tubing is debatable. I have seen a similar thing done with mixte bikes, those step-through frames which have two top-tubes running from the head-tube down to the wheels. The gap between these two tubes is perfect for holding a D-lock.
The Tato comes with a rigid or suspension fork, hydraulic disk-brakes front and back and a trouser-dirtying exposed chain running through derailer* gears. All the components are Shimano Deore. The bike, should you decide you want one, will come from Lichtenstein, so you may be looking at a rather hefty shipping charge depending on where you live.
I have mixed feelings about this novelty frame. It is certainly very good at its single task: carrying a briefcase to work whilst keeping the bike unencumbered by carrying devices. But if you’re not carrying a package that is 400 x 320 x 95 mm (16 x 13 x 4-inches) or smaller, it is pretty impractical. Available now.
Stop. Put down this computer, go pick up your iPad and come back here. Now go get this app: Flipboard. Why? It’s pretty awesome.
Flipboard is one of a growing category of iPad apps that build you a personal newspaper by grabbing content from your social networks. The difference with Flipboard is that it actually feels like picking up a magazine and flipping through it, but the supersimple interface hides some powerful features.
Is it installed on your iPad yet? Good. Go ahead and sign in to your Twitter and Facebook accounts (if you like, visit the settings and add your Instapaper ID, too). Now, go ahead and tap one of the big squares and you’re in the Flipboard. From there you’ll see any articles tweeted by friends, photos and updates from Facebook alongside the actual tweets. So far, so much like every other aggregator.
The difference comes with the interface, which is similar in feel to the Wired app. Turning the iPad makes the page reformat in such as way that you’ll keep turning it, trying to work out how it is done. Flipping to more content is done by swiping to a new page, and to read an article, just tap it. If it is a long article, you can either Instapaper it, or tap to read it on the web.
But the next part is really, really neat. Under (or alongside, depending on how you are holding things) the article you get a panel showing any tweets linking that article. Think of it as being like blog comments, only interesting. You can even tweet a response right there.
Once you’re in an article, you can just swipe to go to the next or hit the little “x” to go back to the main page for that feed. But that’s not all.
Aside from Facebook and Twitter, you can add content from a small range of pre-selected sources. Some of these are actually curated by the Flipboard people (FlipTech, FlipPhotos, etc.) but you can also grab feeds from The Onion and other sites, or search for Twitter feeds.
Even better, Twitter lists finally get a purpose. I searched for “Wired” and one of the results was the Wired Staffers list maintained by @wired. I added that and instantly got a section of news curated by over 200 smart and connected people.
Because Flipboard uses your networks like this, the news is pre-filtered and it’s likely you’ll find far too much interesting stuff to read. I have one more piece of good news to pass along. Flipboard is free, and in the App Store right now. Actually, there is yet another thing to like: The promo video (above) is by Adam Lisagor, aka Lonely Sandwich (aka the guy from the Square ads). If that doesn’t sell you, nothing will.
Panasonic has released five new compact point-and-shoot cameras, ranging from the $250 TS10 up to the $500 LX5, whose premature store listing we covered yesterday. Instead of just running over the specs of the lineup, which would probably be even more boring for you than for me, we’ll take a look at the highlights, starting with the LX5.
The LX5 replaces the two-year-old LX3, but the similarities are bigger than the differences – the sensor is the same 10.1 MP CCD with tweaked sensitivity, for example. New is the redesigned hot-shoe which will now work with an optional electronic viewfinder, as is the ƒ2.0 lens, which now runs from 24-90mm instead of stopping at 60mm (35mm equivalent). Also new is a bigger grip and a GF1-style click-wheel instead of a joystick and the addition of the AVCHD-Lite format for recording 720p video. The price will be $500.
Next in line is the big fat FZ100, the new top-end hybrid which offers the bulk of an SLR with the trimmed-down functions of a compact (seriously, why does anyone buy these?). It has a 3-inch, 460,000 dot tiltable LCD, a too-big 14MP sensor and a huge 25-600mm (equivalent) zoom which opens to ƒ2.8-5.5 as you zoom. That’ll be another $500.
The $400 FX700 can be described as “competent”. It will fit in a pocket, shoot 1080i AVCHD video and 14.1MP stills and show them off on a 230,000-dot LCD, which is also touch-sensitive and does away with most of the buttons. The lens is a decent ƒ2.2-5.9 zoom with an equivalent focal length range of 24-120mm.
Skipping to the bottom-end we get to the $250 TS10, a ruggedized camera with yet another overcrowded 14.1MP sensor, which is waterproof to ten feet and can be dropped from five, shoots 720p video and has a zoom equivalent of 35-140mm. The aperture range is a pitifully average ƒ3.5-5.6.
Phew. The standout here is clearly the LX5, unless you want a bigger camera with a bigger zoom, in which case you should probably just go buy a cheap Canon or Nikon DSLR. Otherwise, buy any of these Panasonics, or any camera from any other first-tier manufacturer. Let’s be honest, they’re all pretty much the same.
Apple has approved a flashlight application which contains a hidden function: Data tethering for the iPhone. The app, named Handy Light, appeared to be yet another flashlight app, but by working through some amusing network settings and then selecting the colors in the app in the right order, it lets iPhone users share cellular internet connection with another wireless device. Predictably the app has already disappeared from the store.
Handy Light is from developer Nick Lee, and cost just $1 in the App Store. You may remember the $10 Netshare, which did the same thing, and suffered the same fate. Why would you want an app to let you tether the iPhone, when AT&T has finally offered official tethering to its users? Because AT&T’s version costs $20 per month extra, and can only be used with the new, crippled 2GB per month data plans. Those holding onto their old unlimited plans are shut out.
To use the app, you need to create an ad-hoc Wi-Fi network on your computer and connect to it with the iPhone. Then, you need to configure the SOCKS proxy on your computer (changing the IP address to 13.37.13.37, ho ho). After this, you hit the secret light-sequence combo in Handy Light and you’re good to go. Sure, its inelegant, but it is (or was) also cheap. If you managed to get ahold of it while it was still on the store, it should also work with your iPad.
Full instructions for Handy Light, should you have somehow downloaded it and not actually realized its hidden dark side, you can find videos all over YouTube (just search for “handy light”) or you can read the step-by-step at App Shopper. Anyone else will have to do it the old-fashioned way and jailbreak their iPhone.
Get ready to start hearing a lot about a startup in Seattle called 
The charming geek podcast Tank Riot did a great job this week with a 2+ hour Douchebag of the Week special on Ronald Reagan: "The Tank Crew discuss the complicated 40th President of the United States, Ronald 'Dutch' Reagan. We examine how his life as an actor, his personality and his philosophy shaped the world of the 1980s and what that means for the future. From lifeguard to acting to SAG president and on to governor and president the journey was unique to Ronald Reagan. Listen to the show and get the full Tank Riot analysis!"
A paper in ACS Nano describes the use of graphene (nanoengineered, one-carbon-atom-thick material) as an antibacterial surface: "Such graphene-based nanomaterials can effectively inhibit the growth of E. coli bacteria while showing minimal cytotoxicity. We have also demonstrated that macroscopic freestanding GO and rGO paper can be conveniently fabricated from their suspension via simple vacuum filtration. Given the superior antibacterial effect of GO and the fact that GO can be mass-produced and easily processed to make freestanding and flexible paper with low cost, we expect this new carbon nanomaterial may find important environmental and clinical applications."
Running a marathon is hard. I should know, I’ve never even considered running one. But a lot of people do. And a lot of people like the idea of going to watch others run marathons. I have no idea why, but they do — I’ve seen it on TV. Anyway, if you have any interest in tracking a marathon, 
Poor old Comic Sans, always getting a bum rap, as in this photo of a pair of dueling passive-aggressive door-notes at an unnamed Fortune 500 corporation. Funny: I fault signmaker the first more for the excessive use of exclamation points; and number two needs a refresher course in capitalization -- "lemonade stand" is only a proper noun if you're talking about the Apple ][+ game.
Want to own an enormous, Seth Thomas four-sided tower clock with complete works from 1904? Up for bids on eBay, starting at $26K. Each face is five feet in diameter, and the clock stood for years at Montgomery Brothers jewelers at Broadway and Fourth Street in Los Angeles.
Figures 5 and 6 compare the identified farmer network to the Caviar drug-trafficking network. Both the real world and virtual criminal networks exhibit very similar performance and resilience under degree attack and random failures. Removing fewer than 1% of the nodes by attack keeps the fraction of the network in the LCC (largest connected component) relatively high and the number of isolates in the network relatively low. However, these networks are an order of magnitude more sensitive to node removal than the affiliate networks analyzed in Figure 4; removing approximately 5% of nodes by degree attack cuts the fraction of nodes in the largest connected component below 50% while increasing the fraction of isolates to approximately 50%.
You’ve likely seen the 
In this week’s episode of 
For a long time, CafePress was the major player in customized product creation on the Internet. Slowly other sites sprang up, like Zazzle, Skreened, StickerGiant, Lulu, and many more. Many of these options are novelty one-offs, though, and you’re paying for the customization, not the craftsmanship, of the product. But the success of these somewhat kitschy sites have revealed a real hunger in consumers for customized, personalized products, and a new wave of entrepreneur is capitalizing on this trend to bring customization to 
I’m going to have to file this one under “Why didn’t I think of that?” Camarush took a simple egg timer, modified it to have a tripod mount on the bottom and the top, and then put their idea up on a website for sale. Good on ‘em, I say.
As you may have noticed, Twitter has had some reliability issues over the past few months. Part of this was 
Recently, 
Microsoft is in a giving mood. Just last month they 
Apple has approved a flashlight application which contains a hidden function: Data tethering for the iPhone. The app, named Handy Light, appeared to be yet another flashlight app, but by working through some amusing network settings and then selecting the colors in the app in the right order, it lets iPhone users share cellular internet connection with another wireless device. Predictably the app has already disappeared from the store.
