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Sony likely returned to profitability in past quarter
Financially speaking, Sony had to go through some rough patches in the last few years. But if The Nikkei, Japan’s largest business daily, is to believed, things are beginning to look brighter. Sony is seen bouncing back in the April to June quarter of this year, with a a group operating profit of $115 million to $345 million in that time frame. The company suffered from a $296 million loss in the same quarter last year. According to The Nikkei, it was mainly radical cost cutting measures (which amounted to a whopping $3.8 billion) that helped Sony get back to the black. The company has reportedly seen strong sales of computers (pictured: Sony’s Vaio P), digital cameras with interchangeable lenses, LCD TVs, and video cameras – especially in China and other emerging markets. What’s interesting is that both the cell phone and gaming segments seem to have returned to profitability, too.
Source: CrunchGear | 26 Jul 2010 | 4:21 am What Windows Phone 7 doesn't have becomes a hot topic - Computerworld
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 26 Jul 2010 | 4:00 am HTC gives up waiting on AMOLEDs, switches to SLCD on Desire and Nexus One
Shortages for the Droid Incredible have been blamed on Samsung’s inability to keep up with demand, so it’s peculiar that HTC didn’t call the phone out directly in their press release, instead saying that the screens will be coming to “a variety of HTC phones including the HTC Desire and global Nexus One later this summer.” Interestingly, one of the benefits of AMOLED over LCD is its low power consumption, but these new screens will apparently bring with them an increase in battery life, not to mention the ability to read them in sunlight. Full PR is included below:
Source: MobileCrunch | 26 Jul 2010 | 3:59 am Viral Video: Song-a-Day Guy on How He Writes a Song a Day [BoomTown]
Here’s a song from the Song-a-Day guy on YouTube–also known as Jonathan Mann–on how he writes a song a day. Mann, as you recall, just had his song about the Apple (AAPL) iPhone 4 antenna issue, played at the press conference about the controversy. He also penned the catchy but annoying Bing jingle winner, “Bing Goes the Internet” in late 2009 about the Microsoft (MSFT) search service. Today, it’s a ditty about how he does these ditties, which are often tech-oriented. In fact, below that one, is another he did recently on Apple CEO Steve Jobs, using video from the recent Walt Mossberg and I did with him at the D: All Things Digital conference. Enjoy: #570#541Source: All Things Digital | 26 Jul 2010 | 3:33 am Street Fighter X Tekken 'isn't a collaboration' - Namco - Computerandvideogames.com
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 26 Jul 2010 | 3:33 am AudioBox.fm Hits iPhone, Stream Your Music Collection From The Cloud AudioBox.fm, the cloud-based music service that lets users upload their music collection and access it anywhere, has added the iPhone/iPod touch to its list of supported devices through a native application.
Previously, iPhone users could only access AudioBox via Mobile Safari, a bit of a kludge since the QuickTime Player plugin effectively takes over the phone's browser. There's also existing support for Android, a nifty HTML5-based browser version and a Windows desktop app, with the Italy-based company touting itself as an open platform to store a user's media library in the cloud, giving them "access to uploaded media from anywhere through the highest number of devices possible."
Source: TechCrunch | 26 Jul 2010 | 3:24 am Will Zynga Become the Google of Games? - New York Times (blog)
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 26 Jul 2010 | 3:23 am Mars Rover 'Curiosity' Grows Up, Rolls for the First TimeIt's been a busy few days for the Mars Science Laboratory after NASA engineers and technicians attach the rover's 'eyes' and take it for a test drive.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Jul 2010 | 2:43 am Online Banking Trojan Stole Money From Belgianshankwang writes "Belgian authorities uncovered an international network of online banking fraud (Google translation; Dutch original), which has been going on since 2007. The fraud targeted customers of several major banks, which used supposedly secure two-factor systems that require the customer to generate authorization codes from transaction information (random code and amount or recipient's account number) that is manually keyed into a cryptographic device (Flash demo from one of the banks; manufacturer's website). Trojan horses that were planted onto the victims' computers would generate a fake error message and request that the victim re-enter the authorization code. This way, amounts up to €4,000 were transferred to money mules and thence to Eastern Europe. The worrying part is that many cases were never reported to the police, because the bank preferred to refund the money to the victim rather than risking its reputation. The extent of this type of fraud is unknown." The article mentions in passing that similar crimes are occurring in Germany and Sweden.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 26 Jul 2010 | 2:37 am Penny Auction Site MadBid Secures £4m From Atomico MadBid, a fast growing "pay-to-bid" auction site has secured £4 million in a Series A funding from Atomico Ventures. Launched in 2008, MadBid is one of a number of pay-to-bid auction sites which have appeared in the last couple of years, with Swoopo among them. CEO Juha Koski says the Atomico investment will be spent on technology and expanding in Europe. Mattias Ljungman of Atomico has joined the board.
MadBid is claiming 1 million users since launch and says customers are attracted by brand products with the possibility of saving of 80% on the RRP of an item. That drives people to bid of course and so the site makes its money off the customers who are not successful, not unlike a casino.
Source: TechCrunch | 26 Jul 2010 | 2:29 am Giving E-books a Spot on the Charts - TIME
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 26 Jul 2010 | 2:05 am US documents leaked online give inside look at war (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 26 Jul 2010 | 1:31 am Baidu plans to offer search on mobile phonesChinese search engine Baidu is in talks with mobile-phone makers about using its search box on handsets sold in China, the Wall Street Journal quoted Robin Li, the company's chief executive officer, as...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 Jul 2010 | 1:17 am Should Environmental Protection Extend to the Planets?Do we have an ethical duty to respect and preserve the natural environments of neighboring planets and their moons?Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Jul 2010 | 1:12 am Android and Apps - Computerworld
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 26 Jul 2010 | 1:07 am Should Coke Execs Be More Hip to Online Porn References? [Voices]By Bernhard Warner, Editorial Director, Social Media Influence In the growing list of social media marketing #fails, Coca-Cola’s Dr Pepper Facebook campaign debacle marks a new twist on an old marketing axiom: Never underestimate your most influential market—moms. Mommy-bloggers trump all in influence. That much we know. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 26 Jul 2010 | 1:04 am Managing Data at the End of the World [Voices]By Niraj Chokshi, Staff Editor, The Atlantic Counterintuitive as it might sound, even in the coldest place on earth, overheating electronics remain a concern. The air at the Geographic South Pole is simply way too frigid to blow over whirring servers there, says John Jacobsen, a Chicago software consultant. Vents can freeze shut or open and the air still has to be conditioned for the hardware. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 26 Jul 2010 | 1:03 am In Hollywood, Everybody's a Digital Revolutionary [Voices]By Brooks Barnes, Media Reporter, New York Times The boom in digital entertainment — interrupted by the recession and the credit freeze — has returned to Hollywood. Almost daily, it seems, another start-up pops up to proclaim how it will revolutionize movies or television. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 26 Jul 2010 | 1:02 am New iPhone app could prove a nightmare for home vendorsThe Sydney Morning Herald reports on a new app for the iPhone 3GS, that allows the user to locate nearby property development proposals just by pointing their mobile at a home, is likely to send shudders...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 Jul 2010 | 1:02 am Telcos Are Winning The Cable TV Battle But Are They Losing The Broadband War? [Voices]By Yinka Adegoke, Media Reporter, Reuters The latest quarterly numbers from AT&T (T) and Verizon Communications (VC) points to steady addition of TV customers which they are very likely winning from the cable companies as well as satellite players. AT&T said it posted its first ever billion-dollar revenue quarter for its U-Verse services (which includes Internet). Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 26 Jul 2010 | 1:01 am Seven Reasons Why Techies Love "Inception" [Voices]By John Hagel, Deloitte Touche USA LLP With opening weekend box office receipts of $62.8 million, it’s clear that the film “Inception” appeals to a broad audience, but Silicon Valley in particular is burning with love for this movie. And I can see why: I loved Inception because I am a geek and a techie at heart. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 26 Jul 2010 | 1:00 am Tallying Up Viewers [Voices]By Suzanne Vranica, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal Some of the nation’s biggest media companies and advertisers, seeking to develop new ways of measuring audiences, could make Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) iPhone the vehicle for a study of how Americans consume media on a range of devices–from TV sets to mobile phones to computers. The study would be one of the first major initiatives of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, a high-profile collaboration between the media and ad industries begun last summer with much fanfare. “When you go from a single-media world to a multimedia world, then all the media-measurement techniques have to change” says Jane Clark, managing director of CIMM. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 26 Jul 2010 | 1:00 am Graphene OPV - or will T-shirts soon power cell phonesA University of Southern California team has produced flexible transparent carbon atom films that the researchers say have great potential for a new breed of solar cells. Printed Elelctronics World reports...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 Jul 2010 | 12:55 am The Puzzle of Japanese Web DesignI'm Not There (1956) writes "Jeffrey Zeldman brings up the interesting issue of the paradox between Japan's strong cultural preference for simplicity in design, contrasted with the complexity of Japanese websites. The post invites you to study several sites, each more crowded than the last. 'It is odd that in Japan, land of world-leading minimalism in the traditional arts and design, Web users and skilled Web design practitioners believe more is more.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 26 Jul 2010 | 12:45 am Nadia Digital Camera Lacks Live Preview, Instead Provides An Aesthetics Rating Of What You've ShotBy Andrew Liszewski Normally it’s not the camera that makes a good photograph, but the photographer. But the Nadia digital camera, created by Andrew Kupresanin, could turn anyone into an Ansel Adams...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 Jul 2010 | 12:41 am Women at OSCON: Did You Notice?I spent much of the week at OSCON, which served in part as a very visual reminder for something that is always on the back of my mind: the absence of women in tech. While women make up 25% of those who...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 Jul 2010 | 12:05 am Federal judge says you can break DRM if you're not doing so to infringe copyrightHere's some remarkable news: a judge in a New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Appeals Court has ruled that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on breaking DRM only applies if you break DRM in order to violate copyright law. This is a complete reversal of earlier rulings across the country (and completely opposite to the approach that the US Trade Representative has demanded from America's trading partners). In the traditional view, DRM is absolutely protected, so that no one is allowed to break it except the DRM maker. In other words, a film-maker isn't allowed to take the BluRay DRM off her own movie, a video game programmer can't take the iPad DRM off her own game, and an audiobook author can't take the DRM off his own Audible book.So this ruling is pretty interesting news, as it constitutes a circuit split with pretty much the rest of the nation's courts, which is often a precursor to a Supreme Court challenge. What's more, the defendants here are General Electric, not hackers in black t-shirts or sketchy offshore Xbox-modchip vendors (theoretically the law shouldn't care if the defendant is a hobo or a billionaire, but in practice, billionaires usually get better precedents, and not just because they can afford better lawyers). It's up to the plaintiff, MGE, to appeal to the Supremes, but even if they don't, it's only a matter of time until there are new cases in the Fifth Circuit (or other circuits that follow its lead) that lead to highest court handing down some new law on this. Let's hope they see the sense of Judge Garza: "Merely bypassing a technological protection that restricts a user from viewing or using a work is insufficient to trigger the (Digital Millennium Copyright Act's) anti-circumvention provision." Court Backs Dismissal of Digital Copyright Claim (via /.)
  Source: Boing Boing | 25 Jul 2010 | 11:47 pm Federal judge says you can break DRM if you're not doing so to infringe copyrightHere's some remarkable news: a judge in a New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Appeals Court has ruled that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on breaking DRM only applies if you break DRM in order to...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Jul 2010 | 11:47 pm SPECIAL FEATURE: The Birthing of Estee LongahEstee Longah, a fabulous vintage queen and founder of a semi-pro all-Asian drag troupe called the Rice Rockettes, puts on lavish, highly sexualized performances... They're empowering a population of gay...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Jul 2010 | 11:46 pm SPECIAL FEATURE: The Birthing of Estee LongahEstee Longah, a fabulous vintage queen and founder of a semi-pro all-Asian drag troupe called the Rice Rockettes, puts on lavish, highly sexualized performances... They're empowering a population of gay men to experiment with a mode of self-expression that is often taboo and sometimes even non-existent in their own cultures.
BEARINGS GLOCKEN Musical Instrument Does Anyone Remember Animusic?By Andrew Liszewski Does anybody remember that Animusic animation that ATI used to demo their RADEON 9700 cards? Like way back in 2002? Well here’s an incredibly simple, though real-life version,...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Jul 2010 | 11:38 pm Gamers buzzing over release of 'StarCraft II' - In-Forum
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 25 Jul 2010 | 11:35 pm Green Giant ad, 1947From the most excellent Vintage Ads LiveJournal group, this smashing look at the alternate Green Giant universe of 1947, in which the GG looks decidedly satanic, and enjoys a cannibalistic corn-cob pipe...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Jul 2010 | 11:31 pm Green Giant ad, 1947 From the most excellent Vintage Ads LiveJournal group, this smashing look at the alternate Green Giant universe of 1947, in which the GG looks decidedly satanic, and enjoys a cannibalistic corn-cob pipe.
NEW PACK'S IN!
Practice ceramics on your iPad with Let’s create! Pottery HD (Appolicious)Appolicious - There’s something about working with raw clay and water in a ceramics setting that best represents the act of artistic creation. The Let’s create! Pottery HD ($4.99), developed by Infinite Dreams for the iPad, offers a digital replica of the pottery experience, succeeding in being both therapeutic and entertaining.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 Jul 2010 | 11:30 pm Existential D&D comedy: when characters realize they are trapped in adolescents' imaginationCarlton Mellick, III, the king of Bizarro fiction, has a new one out -- a kind of Dungeons and Dragons meets The Matrix. The Kobold Wizard's Dildo of Enlightenment +2 is "an absurd comedy about a group...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Jul 2010 | 11:27 pm Existential D&D comedy: when characters realize they are trapped in adolescents' imagination
Carlton Mellick, III, the king of Bizarro fiction, has a new one out -- a kind of Dungeons and Dragons meets The Matrix. The Kobold Wizard's Dildo of Enlightenment +2 is "an absurd comedy about a group of adventurers (elf, halfling, bard, dwarf, assassin, thief) going through an existential crisis after having discovered that they are really just pre-rolled characters living inside of a classic AD&D role playing game. While exploring the ruins of Tardis Keep, these 6 characters must deal with their inept Dungeon Master's retarded imagination and resist their horny teenaged players' commands to have sex with everything in sight. "
OUT NOW: The Kobold Wizard's Dildo of Enlightenment +2 [CarltonMellick.com] The Kobold Wizard's Dildo of Enlightenment +2 [Amazon] (via Super Punch)  Source: Boing Boing | 25 Jul 2010 | 11:27 pm Terrified guardians of public safety protect kids from rocks, other imaginary dangersLenore "Free Range Kids" Skenazy's editorial in Forbes aims at the excessive regulatory zeal in kids' product safety -- where even the faintest whiff of danger is grounds for a recall:Students Aren't Allowed To Touch Real Rocks (via JWZ)  Source: Boing Boing | 25 Jul 2010 | 11:22 pm Study of MMOG Proves Human Interaction TheoryAn anonymous reader writes "A new study analyzing interactions among 300,000+ players in an online game universe, called Pardus, has for the first time provided large-scale evidence to prove an 80-year-old psychological theory called Structural Balance Theory. The research, published in PNAS, shows that individuals tend to avoid stress-causing relationships when they develop a society, resulting in more stable social networks."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 25 Jul 2010 | 11:01 pm iPad Launch May Be Delayed For Some Countries (Mashable)Mashable - Here's some bad news for those countries still in line for an iPad launch: LG, one of the largest supplier of displays for Apple's iPad, says it cannot meet the enormous demand for the device.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 Jul 2010 | 10:26 pm This week in search 7/25/10This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.As we seek to expand the most comprehensive search experience on the web, we've made a number of recent enhancements to your search results. Ultimately, what you're looking for isn't limited to text websites; you may be looking for a tweet, a video or a place—and we want to make sure you can find all of it. This week, we've made it easier to find definitions and images. Dictionary search feature enhancements When it comes to dictionary-related searches, both content and precision are vital. Recently, we expanded our dictionary search feature to all global English users, giving you quick and easy access to even more useful dictionary information. We added implicit triggering, which means you can simply search for [flummox] and find the definition, you don't have to search for [define flummox] or [what is flummox]. We've also improved the definition result snippet to show more details such as parts of speech and pronunciation. Stay tuned for more enhancements here, including an expanded mobile experience. Example search: [stupendous]  Our biggest redesign yet for Google Images Our focus on comprehensiveness extends itself to our other search properties, including Google Images. Over time, Google Images has become a very popular source of visual information. For many of you, Google Images has become a great tool for inspiration, learning, and even shopping. And, today, we've indexed more than 10 billion images -- so you can imagine the depth. With this in mind, we have introduced a new design for Google Images. You'll now see a dense, tiled layout that makes it easy to view many images—up to 1,000—on a single scrollable page. In addition, we made the thumbnail previews on the results page larger, so all you have to do is hover over an image to get an even larger view. You'll also find more information about the image, and other image-specific features in the thumbnail preview. Once you click an image, you'll be taken to a new landing page that displays a large image directly over the website that hosts the image—so you can instantly learn more about the source and context. Example search: [sunflowers] or [new york] We hope you enjoyed this week's changes making your web experience even more comprehensive. Stay tuned for more search enhancements next week. Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience    
 Source: The Official Google Blog | 25 Jul 2010 | 10:26 pm July 26, 1943: L.A. Gets First Big SmogIn the middle of World War II, Los Angeles residents believe the Japanese are attacking them with chemical warfare. A thick fog that makes people’s eyes sting and their noses run has taken hold of the city.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 25 Jul 2010 | 10:00 pm Photo Gallery: Attack of the L.A. Smog ArchivesPhotographs from the vast collection of the UCLA Library gives you a glimpse — often hazy, sometimes wacky — of Southern California's struggle against smog from the 1940s through the 1960s.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 25 Jul 2010 | 10:00 pm 16-bit waterfalls in CanvasBeautiful, old-school Amiga-style pallette cyling with HTML5. [Effect Games via Digital Tools] Source: Boing Boing | 25 Jul 2010 | 9:43 pm The Wallee: The Real Apple TV
Look at me. Now look at the kitchen wall. Now look at me again. I’m on a horse. Look again? Look at the iPad on the wall! Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I’d like to present to you the Wallee, a thingamabob for your iPad that lets you attach it to your wall. That’s right: you’ve just made your own 10-inch Apple TV.      
Source: TechCrunch | 25 Jul 2010 | 9:42 pm Wallee: The Real Apple TV
Look at me. Now look at the kitchen wall. Now look at me again. I’m on a horse. Look again? Look at the iPad on the wall! Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I’d like to present to you the Wallee, a thingamabob for your iPad that lets you attach it to your wall. That’s right: you’ve just made your own 10-inch Apple TV.
Source: CrunchGear | 25 Jul 2010 | 9:38 pm WikiLeaks Publishes Afghan War SecretsA number of readers submitted word on the massive WikiLeaks release of Afghanistan war documents. "The data is provided in CSV and SQL formats, sorted by months, and also was rendered into KML mapping data." WikiLeaks provided the documents in advance to the New York Times, Der Spiegel, and the UK's Guardian — the latter also has up a video tutorial on how to read the logs. From the Times: "A six-year archive of classified military documents... offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal. The secret documents... are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year. The New York Times, the British newspaper The Guardian, and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given access to the voluminous records several weeks ago on the condition that they not report on the material before Sunday. The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 25 Jul 2010 | 8:20 pm Some Tech Behind Inception And Avatar Becomes A Reality On Your iPad And iPhone
Several years ago, it seems like just about everyone saw the film Titanic. This past year, it seems the same was true for Avatar. And this past Summer, it seems as if everyone is seeing Inception. All three films share something in common: their use of Autodesk Maya, a piece of visual effects software. Now that technology has been ported to the iPhone and iPad. Obviously, Autodesk Fluid FX isn’t going to be as powerful as Maya running on a hardcore system. But Fluid FX is nonetheless impressive. And it’s pretty amazing that these kind of effects can be done on these relatively cheap consumer devices, whereas a just a few years ago systems costing thousands of dollars were required to render this stuff. The best way to describe what the app can do is to show it to you. For that, watch the video below. But basically, it’s an app that lets you manipulate pictures with a range of effects. And it has other natural elements like smoke and fire that you can manipulate on your iPad or iPhone. The use of these devices’ multi-touch capabilities is the key to all of this. The app can recognize up to 10 simultaneous multi-touch inputs, we’re told. The resulting work you make can saved to your devices. Or you can output any of this to a larger screen, like a television. There’s also a way to cycle through various effects and put them on display. But to me Fluid FX is just as interesting as a technological demonstration of what these devices are now capable of. And perhaps even more so, as a way to show was the other software Autodesk offers is capable of. Autodesk’s Joe Stam, who has won two Oscars for his work effect work on films, created this app. Previously, Autodesk has released Sketchbook Mobile for the iPhone and iPad, which was a top-selling app. Autodesk Fluid FX will be out in the App Store tomorrow. It will cost $1.99.
     
Source: TechCrunch | 25 Jul 2010 | 7:30 pm Apple's White iPhone Delay a Chance for Antenna Redesign - BusinessWeek
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 25 Jul 2010 | 6:52 pm Wikileaks Releases Stunning Afghan War Logs -- Is Iraq Next?The secret-spilling site Wikileaks release a breathtaking classified compendium of 77,000 events covering six years of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. But they could have much more.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 25 Jul 2010 | 6:40 pm Wikileaks releases classified Afghanistan war logs: "largest intelligence leak in history"
An archive of classified U.S. military logs spanning six years, more than 91,000 documents, and 200,000 pages, was today made available by WikiLeaks. The papers show a picture of the war in Afghanistan that is far more grim, and far less hopeful, than previously portrayed. The New York Times, London's Guardian newspaper and Der Spiegel in Germany were offered early access to the archive, the contents of which show "why, after the United Sates has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001," according to the NYT. This classified military information release by WikiLeaks is its first since publishing a video in April that shows a 2007 US Apache helicopter attack which killed a dozen people in Baghdad, including two Reuters photojournalists. The NYT notes the following focal points in this massive leak: * Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan's military spy service guides the Afghan insurgency that fights American troops, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion in U.S. aid. The "War Diary" page at Wikileaks states: We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source. After further review, these reports will be released, with occasional redactions, and eventually, in full, as the security situation in Afghanistan permits.
"Text From a Selection of the Secret Dispatches" (NYT) "In Disclosing Secret Documents, WikiLeaks Seeks 'Transparency'" (NYT) "Piecing Together the Reports, and Deciding What to Publish" (NYT)
"Julian Assange on the Afghanistan war logs: 'They show the true nature of this war'" (Guardian) "Wikileaks Afghanistan files: download the key incidents as a spreadsheet" (Guardian) "Afghanistan war logs: Story behind biggest leak in intelligence history" (Guardian) "Afghanistan war logs: the glossary" (Guardian)
[video] "Secret files: Wikileaks exposes 'unseen war'" (Channel 4 News)
 Source: Boing Boing | 25 Jul 2010 | 6:34 pm NSFW: Sorry AirBnB Hipsters, I’ll Take Health and Safety Over the Cult of Disruption
And as for you, hotels – ha! hotels! – if ever there was an industry ripe for disruption, it’s you clowns. Charging $300 a night for a bed and a shower and a tiny plastic enema of shampoo when AirBnB will let you get the same, and more, for $50, so long as you don’t mind the creepy thrill of living in a stranger’s apartment. Kapow! See you in hell, hotels! But of course the old men are fighting back – dusting down their old service uniforms and oiling their muskets and surrounding themselves with legislative sandbags to prolong their pathetic existence for another few months. This week, New York Governor, David Paterson, signed a bill outlawing the use of private dwellings as makeshift hotels. The bill, supported by hotel industry lobbyists (natch), bans rentals of less than 30 days and makes operating a residential apartment as a transient hotel illegal in New York City. Good news for big hotels, bad news for poor old New Yorkers who now find themselves banned from letting space in their apartments using AirBnB or Craigslist. And even worse news for NY-bound tourists who will now struggle to find a room in Manhattan for less than $100 a night (apart from these). As TechDirt’s Mike Masnick puts it, “the internet has made it so that people can be more efficient in things like transportation or short-term housing, and the old guard doesn’t like it one bit, so they come up with regulations like these to outlaw it.” Yeah! Except, no. Disclosure: I like hotels a lot – and I’ve spent much of my life in them. Both of my parents are career-long hoteliers, first managing large corporate chain units and now owning their own hotel in the UK. A couple of years ago I decided to sell almost all of my possessions, abandon my over-priced apartment in London and instead live permanently in hotels – in San Francisco, or wherever in the world I find myself in any given month. I’ve just finished writing a book about hotel living. In the past thirty years I’ve stayed in hundreds – thousands? – of hotels. Some have been amazingly opulent, some adequate, some dreadful, some absolute flea-pit shit holes by the side of highways in Dallas. But every one of them has been licensed to operate as a hotel. Why? Because I don’t want to be burned alive by faulty wiring. Because I don’t want to be robbed, or scammed or murdered. Because I want to pay by credit card and not have that card cloned. Because I want legal recourse if something goes wrong. Call me old-fashioned. In New York, as in many major cities, there is a serious problem with transient hotels. Slum landlords know that even the most scummy city apartment – $500 a month stuff – can deliver that same amount per day simply by packing the place with bunk beds and advertising it on Craigslist or any one of the plethora of foreign language NYC hotel sites as a travelers’ hotel. Not only does this put guests at risk due to a lack of fire exits or basic electrical safety, while causing a living hell of noise and violence and shady goings on for the owners of adjacent apartments – but, given that New York apartment vacancy rates are hovering around 1% (against an 8% national average), it also makes it harder for families to find somewhere else to live when they’re forced out by drug-addled European backpackers armed with camping stoves. And yet, despite all of these sound reasons for outlawing faux-tels, it seems that some people would rather let a Spaniard burn to death, or a family be left homeless, than allow The Man to impede the rise of AirFuckingBnB. Says the opening para of this post by one Sean O’Neill, writing on Newsweek’s budget travel blog…
And says Joe Gebbia, president of AirBnB.com…
Yeah, Joe. Screw the small number of “illegal hotels” and the untold misery they cause. Hipsters in peril – that’s the big story here. Except it’s really not. For a start, there’s an explicit exemption in the bill that allows for the letting of rooms in private dwellings if the owner is present (as is often the case in AirBnB lets). And for other lets (absent owners can lend their rooms, but are banned from taking money) State Senator Liz Krueger who sponsored the bill has made it clear that “the city is not going to knock on doors,”; AirBnB users will only fall foul of the law if their neighbours complain. Which they’re perfectly entitled to do. And yet, commentators like Masnick and O’Neill and entrepreneurs like Gebbia are so enraptured by the cult of “Disruption” – that any use of the Internet to circumvent the traditional way of doing things is inherently good – that they can’t help but see the new law as The Man standing in the way of Progress. Or as Masnick puts it “the hotels, which have their high prices and don’t like the competition.” They simply can’t contemplate the heretical idea that sometimes The Man is right, and that some of his laws are created for good reason. That not everyone on the Internet is a Gawker-reading, fixie riding hipster who just wants to share his space with weary travelers for a few bucks extra pot money. That some people on Craigslist are criminals. That sometimes legislation is needed to protect innocent people from those criminals, even if it stops the rest of us us doing precisely what we want. And that one of the dictionary definitions of Disrupt is “to interrupt or impede progress”, rather than the opposite. Blogs disrupting newspapers is great, except when no-one can be held accountable for gross inaccuracies and libels. Online pharmacies disrupting doctors is great until someone is poisoned by Indian ‘viagra’. And advertising rooms on the Internet without legal safeguards is great until the platform is used by gangsters and slum lords to drive families from their apartments and fleece tourists into spending their vacations under unsafe roofs. If AirBnB et al are so smart then they’ll figure out a way to thrive in New York’s new legislative environment. These are, after all, disruptive times. But if they can’t understand the fact that disruption cuts both ways, and that the rights of Internet folk to create awesome new business models doesn’t trump a city’s right to disrupt criminality, then it’s time for them – not the hotels industry or legislators – to get out of the way. Young man. Information provided by CrunchBase Information provided by CrunchBase      
Source: TechCrunch | 25 Jul 2010 | 5:56 pm Going Global: George Stephanopoulos And ABC News Execs Discuss New iPad App
To learn more about the app, our own Lora Kolodny ventured over the ABC News headquarters, where she interviewed anchor George Stephanopoulos and a pair of execs who helped create the application. Stephanopoulos says that he was quickly enamored of the application’s globe, which is a running theme in the interviews (though he said that he hadn’t had a chance to play around with it too much at the time of the interview). On a related note, when guaging his affinity for gadgets on a scale of 1-10, he gives himself a 4.5 (he does own an iPad, but his family has issues getting the cable box to behave properly). Andrew Morse, Executive Producer of Integration and Innovation at ABC News Digital, says that the globe is meant to be a “meandering experience”. He explains that on traditional sites, people complain that you only get what you’re looking for, and that there isn’t the discovery factor you get from a newspaper. Isaac Josephson, VP Product Development for ABC News Digital, says that the team has been working on the app for a solid three months, and that it stirred up more excitement among traditional broadcasters than any previous product they’d developed. My take on the app? Looks aren’t everything — if you want to catch up on the day’s top headlines at a glance, this might not be what you’re looking for. The globe may be fun, but in my experience it also has a habit of obscuring most of the app’s available content (only two or three stories are legible at once). You can flick the globe around a few times and be pretty confident that you’ve seen everything, but it’s hard to kick the nagging feeling that you may have inadvertently skipped over the day’s top story. That said, the ABC team may be right: if you’re just looking to kill some time discovering random highlights from the day’s news, this may be exactly what you’re looking for. And if you just want the headlines, you can venture over to the ABC News HTML5 site, which is integrated into the app.
     
Source: TechCrunch | 25 Jul 2010 | 5:55 pm Glass Invisibility Cloak Shields InfraredAn anonymous reader writes with the latest advance in the quest for a cloak of invisibility (Michigan Tech University's press release). We've been following this research as it develops; here a story in each of the last four years. "Invisibility cloaks are slowly working their way up to shorter wavelengths — starting at millimeter-long microwaves and working their way to the nanometer wavelengths of visible light. EETimes says we are about half way there — micrometer wavelengths — in this story about using chalcogenide glass to create invisibility cloaks in the infrared. Quoting: 'Invisibility cloaks cast in chalcogenide glass can render objects invisible to infrared frequencies of light, according to researchers at Michigan Technological University... Most other demonstrations of invisibility cloaks have used metamaterials composed of free-space split-ring resonators that were constructed from metal printed-circuit board traces surrounded by traditional dielectric material. The Michigan Tech researchers... claim that by substituting nonmetallic glass resonators made from chalcogenide glass, infrared cloaks are possible too...'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 25 Jul 2010 | 5:50 pm Gadgetell Review: LG Sentio by T-Mobile USASection: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Reviews, Features, Originals
I have spent a few weeks trying out the LG Sentio on T-Mobile and it is a pretty solid featurephone even with its limited hardware. It doesn’t come with any earth-shattering features, but it does what you would expect from a normal phone - call, text, and limited web options. What is it?The LG Sentio features a 3 inch touch screen with a virtual QWERTY keyboard, web access through T-Mobile’s web2go browser, 3G connection, slim profile, weighs only 3.26 ounces, 3MP camera, video capture, and can play a variety of audio formats. The LG Sentio comes in a navy blue finish and features T-Mobile’s Social Buzz which aggregates social networking feeds. The LG Sentio is currently available with T-Mobile for $69.99 on a new two-year contract. The GoodThe LG Sentio fits comfortably in my hand pocket due to its slim form factor and compact 3 inch touch screen. The phone can be used easily with one hand and it displays weather, calendar, and other apps of your choosing on the home screen. On the bottom of the screen are four different buttons - Dialer, Contacts, web2go, and Menu. The home screen is completely customizable in terms of apps, but the icons on the bottom row are there permanently. There are only three physical buttons - call, back, and end. Unfortunately, T-Mobile doesn’t have the best service in my area so web browsing is pretty slow. If you are reading an article or checking on your favorite website, the web2go browser will be able to handle the task, but the web browser is pretty basic since it’s a featurephone. The phone comes with a pair of earbuds specifically designed for the phone and it works well when listening to music. I popped in my microSD card from my other phone and was able to listen to music using the phone’s speaker and the earbuds. In terms of messaging, the phone separates texts based on the contact and it organizes texts within a thread the way an iPhone does. It’s easy to switch from T9 to QWERTY just by holding the phone horizontally. For those who prefer virtual keyboards to phyiscal ones, the LG Sentio offers a nice, compact virtual QWERTY keyboard and T9 keypad. It offers a Social Buzz app which allows you to sign into various social networking accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace. For a basic featurephone, it gets the job done of managing social networking, but I find a smartphone handles this task much more efficiently and effectively. The camera (3MP) and camcorder both load up fast when touched and there is a switch that you move up or down to switch between camera and camcorder. Lastly, the battery life is impressive and easily gets through the day with the normal amount of calls, texts, and web browsing. The BadIt doesn’t come with a 3.5 mm headphone jack, so you have to use T-Mobile’s native earbuds. The lack of WiFi is disappointing, especially because I don’t have strong T-Mobile service in my area and web browsing would have been much better with WiFi. The HTML web browser doesn’t load websites as well as I would like, so I wouldn’t recommend getting a data plan on this phone - save it for a smartphone.Sometimes I type faster than the keyboard is able to respond so it delays in messaging from time to time. I think the phone is a bit pricey considering its hardware, I’d like to see it available for free on a new family plan or at least under $30 with a two year contract. The CruxIt’s refreshing to see manufacturers still create featurephones for those who don’t want/need a smartphone. If the price was lowered a little bit, it would be a great phone for anyone who needs a simple, yet capable phone. However, if you don’t mind spending $70 for a quality, low spec’d phone, I would still recommend the LG Sentio on T-Mobile. Check it out [T-Mobile] Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 25 Jul 2010 | 5:49 pm HTC phone pictured running Windows Phone 7, said to be final hardware
It’s said to be CDMA and possibly for Verizon. We’ll probably be seeing this one again soon. HTC isn’t exactly tight as a drum when it comes to new handsets.
Source: MobileCrunch | 25 Jul 2010 | 5:44 pm Uranium Is Getting Some Glowing Reviews On Amazon
Did you know you can buy uranium ore on Amazon? Well you can. It’s actually been on sale for a while — BoingBoing pointed it out back in 2007. But talk of it has recently started popping up around the Internet once again this past week. Our sister site CrunchGear did a quick post pointing it out last week. Since then, a whole new batch of great customer reviews have been flowing in, as Amazon CTO Werner Vogels points out today. Some of the negative reviews note that uranium is “bad for you.” Another says that it killed a pet gorilla. But some positive reviews mark is as a “great gift for a hostile dictator.“ As Vogels points out, the best reviews are highlighted on reviews-only page. The most helpful positive review reads: “So glad I don’t have to buy this from Libyans in parking lots at the mall anymore.” Meanwhile, the most helpful negative review reads: ”I purchased this product 4.47 Billion Years ago and when I opened it today, it was half empty.” Overall, uranium ore has earned 4 out of 5 stars after 221 customer reviews — with the majority of them giving it a 5-star rating. It’s largely seen as a good deal for $29.99. You may recall that these are the same users who love to review milk. The discussions on the uranium page are good as well. One person wants to know, “Does this product put you on the CIA watch list?” Another person wants to know: “This is a joke, right?“ Unrelated, it’s worth noting that people who viewing uranium on Amazon also viewed items such as wolf urine, fresh whole rabbits, and yes, milk. Information provided by CrunchBase      
Source: TechCrunch | 25 Jul 2010 | 5:08 pm 10 Cool Crowdsourced Music Video Projects (Mashable)Mashable - What better way for an artist to engage with his or her fans than by collaborating with them? Although just 10 years ago this would have been an arduous undertaking, collaborative music video projects are now possible thanks to social media and the wonders of the web.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 Jul 2010 | 5:01 pm Testing out the JVC Everio GZ-HM1SU (in the middle of Jamaica)
Did you know that I’ve had the JVC Everio GZ-HM1SU in my possession for about a month now? Kinda hard to know that seeing as though I’ve never written about it. We’re going to fix that right now. And while we’re at it, let’s kill two birds with one stone. A friend of mine invited me to Jamaica last week—he’s some sort of big shot down there, it seems—and I thought to myself, “This looks like an excellent opportunity to really test out the camera, see how it works in a new environment.” It was either that or shoot video of tourists in Times Square. No wants to see that. Before I get too much into this, the truth is that I’m much more comfortable with a still camera than I am with a video camera. I took a proper photography class in school a few years ago—I got an A, thank you very much—, and I’m much more experienced with composing still shots so they don’t look like complete tosh than I am with making a moving scene come to life. In a way, I think that makes me particularly suited to look at this through the eye of a civilian (non-techie). I’ll have the same “oh boy, how do I work this thing?” reaction as you. Build & Construction “How do I turn this thing on? Oh!” Yeah, the camera turns on as soon as you fold out the LCD display. Silly me, looking for a button. There’s a small touch-sensitive strip on the left-hand side of the display that controls up-and-down menu navigation, and a series of small buttons that run underneath the display for confirming and canceling selections. The touch-sensitive strip works, yeah, but I’m not sure it works any better than an old fashion button. Fanciness for fanciness’ sake, I suppose. The strip never feels imprecise, but it did take a minute to figure it out. Of the buttons on the body, you’ll primarily be using the zoom that’s on the top. The above video, taken somewhere off the Sandals on the coast of Negril, shows the range of the zoom. (You might want to see it on YouTube proper to see the full fidelity version.) The video’s a little bumpy because, well, I was on a boat. Boats tend to rock and sway. All the standard ports are here. There’s a stereo mic input that, based on some Amazon sleuthing, isn’t exactly a standard feature on other such cameras. You may want to spring for that external mic, too, since the on-board audio isn’t anything special. If you’re shooting hi-res video it would look awfully silly if you couldn’t quite hear what your subjects are saying. (I bought some Audio Technica mic off eBay, if you’re wondering.) Mics screw right into the top-mounted shoe mount. And, of course, on the bottom is a screw base for mounting to a tripod. Easy to use? Yes, quite easy. It’s literally a question of swinging out the LCD to turn it on, then pressing the record button that’s right where your thumb naturally falls when your hand is placed in the strap. When you’re finished recording hit record again. Done and done. You have 64GB of built-in storage to work with, plus an SD card slot for any additional storage. You can change any number of settings right from the onscreen menu, including recording quality (all of the video seen here were shot using the lowest setting, if only because I knew I was going to upload them to YouTube and not author a Blu-ray disc), white balance, gain, shutter mode, etc. But really, outside of maybe adjusting the video quality, you’re probably just fine leaving everything as is. You can then view your video right there on the display—hope you brought a pair of headphones since the built-in speaker is fairly weak—or output everything to a TV or monitor via HDMI. That could be pretty handy if, during our imaginary family get-together scenario, you have no intention of editing any of the video and just want to show off what you’ve taken right then and there. Like many cameras these days, it shoots up to 1080p. And as mentioned earlier, unless you plan on authoring a Blu-ray disc for later viewing on your giant plasma TV, 1080p is pretty much overkill; 720p is perfectly sufficient for most uses in 2010. In my opinion. Higher resolutions might be more useful in a few years when more people have access to 100 mbps+ Internet connections and sites like YouTube don’t take a day and a half to compress your perfectly rendered filed for the Web. That leads us to something I would think many people now find themselves asking: If I can take 720p video with something like a Flip Mino HD, or Sony Bloggie, or, gasp, my iPhone 4, why would I want to carry around a dedicated camera? I mean, the Everio is small but not exactly fit-in-your-pocket small. It’s the same reason why you’d want to carry around a proper DSLR instead of a point-and-shoot: you value versatility at the expense of convenience. You wouldn’t want your wedding photos taken with a BlackBerry, would you? So, why would you settle for video of your daughter’s recital taken on a device whose sensor is necessarily tiny and whose lens won’t exactly win any medals? Good luck using one of those pocket cameras in low light situations because unless you’re shooting on a bright, sunny day you may find that those small devices don’t work as well as you’d like. (The above video gives a quick look at how the Everio handles light/dark transitions.) Conclusion I realize, even given the above caveats, that buying a camcorder in 2010 isn’t exactly a automatic decision. Plenty of people would be fine with the performance of something like the iPhone 4 if all they’re interested in is getting a quick video of their friends posing in front of White House or in at the ballpark. And the performance of these small devices will only improve in the years to come. It really comes down to whether or not you’re comfortable with the limitations these devices necessarily impose: odds are there’s no jack for an external mic (which is essential if you plan on hearing your subject, particularly on windy days), nor will there be room for an external light source. If you’re just taking video to put on Facebook or whatever—sure, fine, who cares? But for anything even remotely “important” you’d do well to step up to a proper camera. Then there’s the matter of price. At $1,200, the Everio isn’t so much impulse buy as much as it is an investment. But again, if you want a throwaway, ready-for-Facebook camera you’re probably fine with something a little less substantial. There’s no sense in buying more camera than you need. And for no reason at all, dog pulling a sled! Apparently dog sled racing is big down there. 
Source: CrunchGear | 25 Jul 2010 | 4:00 pm The (court) case against San Francisco's cell phone radiation law - Ars Technica
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 25 Jul 2010 | 3:37 pm 343 Industries on building the Halo universe - GameSpot
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 25 Jul 2010 | 3:35 pm BlackBerry Curve 9300 shows up with T-Mobile brandingSection: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones
It looks like T-Mobile may launch the BlackBerry Curve 9300 by RIM because the latest leaked image features the BlackBerry device complete with T-Mobile branding. Unfortunately, the RIM smartphone will most likely not feature BlackBerry 6 because it does not contain enough RAM. Some of the specs for the device include 3G data, GPS, WiFi, 2MP camera, OS 5, 256MB RAM, and a 624MHz processor. If we hear anything official from T-Mobile, we’ll keep you updated. Via [BBGeeks] Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 25 Jul 2010 | 3:20 pm Encoding Video For Mobile Devices?MadGeek007 writes "I am developing at app for Android that will use many short (averaging 10-20 minutes) instructional videos. Unfortunately, I know next to nothing about encoding video. I'd like to use a codec that is supported by Android and iOS out-of-the-box. I need the videos to look decent on large mobile displays (IPhone 4, HTC EVO, etc.), and still be able to stream well on a good 3G connection. The sound quality is also important. With so many different display resolutions on mobile devices, do I need to encode multiple copies of the same video? Or can I get away with a one-size-fits-all video? Can anyone recommend encoding software, codecs, resolutions, and bitrates that would work best for this application?"
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Source: Slashdot | 25 Jul 2010 | 3:13 pm Shock, blame after 19 trampled at German festival (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 Jul 2010 | 2:24 pm Zombie Sharks and Double Rambos: The Best Booty From Comic-Con's Secret StashWired.com patrols the show floor at the annual geek gathering in San Diego in search of Futurama, Shepard Fairey and more obscure finds.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 25 Jul 2010 | 2:20 pm Court Rules That Bypassing Dongle Is Not a DMCA Violationtcrown007 sends along an appeals court ruling that, for once, limits the reach of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention clause. "MGE UPS makes UPS systems and software that are protected by hardware dongles. After the dongles expired, GE bypassed the dongles and continued to use the software. MGE sued, won, and has now lost on GE's appeal. Directly from the court's ruling (PDF): "Merely bypassing a technological protection that restricts a user from viewing or using a work is insufficient to trigger the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision... The owner's technological measure must protect the copyrighted material against an infringement of a right that the Copyright Act protects, not from mere use or viewing.' Say what? I think I just saw a pig fly by."
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Source: Slashdot | 25 Jul 2010 | 1:53 pm Amiga: 25 Years Later (PC World)PC World - Twenty-five years ago on July 23, a new personal computer was unveiled at a black-tie, celebrity-studded gala at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York's Lincoln Center. It debuted to rave reviews and great expectations -- heck, InfoWorld said it might be the "third milestone" in personal computing after the Apple II and the IBM PC.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 Jul 2010 | 1:33 pm Add vintage effects to your movies with CinemaFX For Video (Appolicious)Appolicious - Making new technology produce old-looking media seems to be all the rage right now (see Hipstamatic), so it’s only natural that the developers of ReelDirector have brought forth an app to turn your video clips vintage. CinemaFX For Video only works on iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, and it’s more than worth its $1.99 download price.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 Jul 2010 | 1:27 pm CTIA sues San Francisco over “Right To Know” lawSection: Communications, Cellphones, Smartphones
The lawsuit against San Francisco has to do with the city’s “Right to Know” law regarding phone’s SAR ratings. SAR ratings are essentially rating that say how much RF radiation comes out of phones. Turns out, the FCC does SAR testing on every cell phone that comes into the US already. Those that are FCC approved are deemed as safe for use. CTIA is arguing that displaying a SAR rating at the point-of-sale on cell phones would not be fair to manufacturers. All phones are deemed safe already, and saying on “safe” phone if “safer” than another by showing a rating is unfair to those with higher SAR ratings. To make it even better, the FCC doesn’t find any significant health problems or benefits based on the SAR rating within the approved safe limits. To further protest the law, the CTIA has decided to cancel it’s fall trade show in San Francisco. Read [Phone Scoop] via [MobileCrunch] Full Story » | Written by Shawn Ingram for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 25 Jul 2010 | 1:08 pm ParkWhiz Is The OpenTable For Parking Spots
Via a web app and a newly launched mobile HTML5 website, ParkWhiz allows you to reserve parking near concert and event venues in the U.S. ParkWhiz partners with parking lot owners, which range from people who own a single space to large parking management companies, across the country to list their inventory on ParkWhiz. So far, ParkWhiz has partnered with 300 participating parking locations in over 25 cities in the U.S. Currently, ParkWhiz currently offers parking reservations near Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, AT&T Park, Cowboys Stadium, Madison Square Garden, Busch Stadium, US Cellular Field, Orpheum Theatre, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Beacon Theater, plus 17 airports around the country. For example, ParkWhiz just helped park over 400 cars (who paid on average of $40 per parking spot) for the Paul McCartney concert at AT&T Park last week in San Francisco. ParkWhiz’s CEO and co-founder Aashish Dalal says the startup has also started to serve coupons for restaurants and bars (in neighborhoods nearby the event space) with parking reservations. In terms of pricing, there is no fee to list a parking space on the site; ParkWhiz collects a fee only if a reservation is made and handles payment processing for the parking vendors. Generally, the user has to pay 10 percent customer convenience fee to ParkWhiz in addition to parking price, and ParkWhiz will also take a 15 percent cut from the base rate from the parking vendors. In a year, the site has already taken 50,000 reservations, with the goal of hittig 100,000 resetvations by the end of the year. Of course, ParkWhiz isn’t the first company to use technology to try to solve the problem of finding parking. Car Harbor allows you to rent your parking space, and there are a number of iPhone apps to aim to solve the same problem including Spotswitch and Primospot. Even Google is getting into the parking game, recently launching Open Spot, an Android app that shows you a map with nearby open parking spots marked with colored dots. Information provided by CrunchBase      
Source: TechCrunch | 25 Jul 2010 | 12:55 pm HEARD ON THE STREET: In Phone Wars, Motorola's Hopes Ride on the Droid - Wall Street Journal
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 25 Jul 2010 | 12:48 pm The Possibility of Paradox-Free Time Travelrelliker writes in with word of a paper up on the ArXiv by Seth Lloyd and co-workers, exploring the possibility that "postselection" effects in non-linear quantum mechanics might allow paradox-free time travel. "Lloyd's time machine gets around [the grandfather paradox] because of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics: anything that this time machine allows can also happen with finite probability anyway... Another interesting feature of this machine is that it does not require any of the distortions of spacetime that traditional time machines rely on. In these, the fabric of spacetime has to be ruthlessly twisted in a way that allows the time travel to occur. ... Postselection can only occur if quantum mechanics is nonlinear, something that seems possible in theory but has never been observed in practice. All the evidence so far is that quantum mechanics is linear. In fact some theorists propose that the seemingly impossible things that postselection allows is a kind of proof that quantum mechanics must be linear."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 25 Jul 2010 | 12:35 pm Summary Box: FCC, public safety spar over spectrum (AP)AP - THE FCC PLAN: The Federal Communications Commission wants to auction off a prime piece of wireless spectrum called the D Block to the wireless industry.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 Jul 2010 | 11:30 am Frustration and Unhappiness In the Games IndustryGamasutra's Leigh Alexander recently wrote an editorial about the atmosphere of irritation and dissatisfaction that pervades all aspects of the video game industry. Developers are often overworked and unfulfilled, gamers have no qualms about voicing their disapproval (sometimes quite warranted, sometimes not), and the media, in trying to please both groups, often fails to satisfy either. Why is there so much strife in an industry ostensibly focused on having fun? From the article: "More and more developer sources I talked to suggested that fatigue, hostility, being at odds with one's employer and questioning one's career course is frighteningly common in the game industry. That being the case, it seems natural that elements like emotional detachment, anxiety and a lack of fulfillment make their way, even subtly, into the products the industry creates and into the ecosystem around the industry and its audience. 'Because of the secrecy and competition, a lot of development teams end up having a siege mentality — batten down the hatches and refuse to come up for air until the game's done,' says [an] anonymous developer. 'Game development has a way of taking over your life, because there's always more that can be done to improve perceived quality. I've seen a lot of divorces in my time in the game industry. I feel like it's much greater than average, but I have no statistical evidence.'"
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Source: Slashdot | 25 Jul 2010 | 11:24 am FCC, public safety at odds over broadband plan (AP)AP - Two years ago, the Federal Communications Commission stumbled as it tried to create a nationwide wireless broadband network for police officers, firefighters and emergency medical workers, delaying the construction of what everyone agrees is an urgently needed system.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 Jul 2010 | 11:13 am Apple proves Motorola Droid X suffers from similar Death GripSection: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones
In an attempt to drag as many smartphones into Apple’s “self-made debacle” as possible, the Cupertino giant recently added the Motorola Droid X to its growing list of imperfect smartphones. Apple uploaded a video to YouTube showing how gripping the Motorola Droid X in a certain manner will cause the device to lose all its signal strength. In the image above you can see a summarized version of the video, but the video can be viewed below if you’d rather see it for yourself. I haven’t heard a lot of stories about customers complaining about signal reception as much as iPhone 4 users complained about their situation. Perhaps Apple is trying to make something out of nothing, and until a lot of users begin to report signal issues, I’m sure most people will continue to purchase the Droid X. Read [Apple] Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 25 Jul 2010 | 10:42 am Porn Sites Still Exposed In Chinacrimeandpunishment writes "Could it be that internet censorship in China has a pecking order? Politics and human rights are bad — but porn is okay? The porn sites that suddenly popped up in China two months ago are still accessible, leaving people wondering if it's a change in policy, a glitch, or maybe a test by the Chinese Internet police. The Chinese government isn't saying, but one Internet analyst speculates, 'Maybe they are thinking that if Internet users have some porn to look at, then they won't pay so much attention to political matters.'"
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Source: Slashdot | 25 Jul 2010 | 10:07 am Enterprise Software Is Sexy Again
When we think of sexy technologies, enterprise software usually ranks somewhere between the fax machine and a Zune. With prohibitive pricing, long product cycles and user interfaces only a mother could love, the enterprise offerings of Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and other big vendors are about as appealing as Steve Ballmer in a bikini. Not surprisingly, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have been turned off by these unappealing traits, the near-monopolies held by big players, and the suspicion that problems being solved for the enterprise are less exciting. After all, if you want to rapidly develop and release technology to millions of users, build an agile and innovative company culture, and perhaps break a few rules along the way, you certainly don’t build software for the enterprise. You build Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, YouTube or Blippy. Given all this, why have I decided to go down the road of building a hard-core enterprise software company? It’s simple. Enterprise software is sexy again. Just ask consumer tech guru Marc Andreessen, who recently confessed to being attracted to the new wave of enterprise software companies, or Peter Thiel, who thinks Palantir is hot to the tune of a $750M valuation. Palantir is like the Jack Bauer of business software, helping to prevent terrorism and predict the spread of infectious diseases. Fortune 500 companies use Box.net to collaborate on billions of dollars in transactions, streamline national advertising campaigns, and help build new space shuttles (seriously, space shuttles). Cloudera is helping big businesses solve their biggest data challenges. Jive is building a meaningfully large business by bringing social into the enterprise, and just raised another $30M to do so. Zuora is reinventing customer subscriptions and payments, and has quickly grown to manage more than $1 billion in subscription revenue. These companies – along with Workday, PBWorks, Asana, Rypple, Salesforce, and dozens of others – are tackling big problems and even bigger markets, placing a premium on innovation, and building cultures around product execution rather than pure sales. And by doing so, they’re making enterprise software sexy (yes, I’m going to use this word a lot in this post, prepare yourself). Big Problems, Large Markets, New Scale Enterprises today have massive amounts of information to analyze and manage, disparate employees to connect, prospective customers across the world to market to, and business problems that need to be solved in real-time. Buyers across businesses of all sizes are on the prowl for better, sexier technologies to address these challenges, and collectively they have hundreds of billions of dollars in budget. The US government alone will spend nearly $80 billion next year on information technology. Compare that to a $24.2 billion pie for all of US internet advertising, the revenue stream for a large portion of web companies. New enterprise software companies are emerging to address problems that didn’t exist (or couldn’t be solved) a decade ago, and those with the most efficient and effective solution are being rewarded greatly. These newcomers wouldn’t have stood a chance against the behemoths in the client-server paradigm, but the cloud is an inherently democratizing force, removing any unnatural channel, sales, or distribution advantages from providers. With the cloud, every user within an organization is a potential buyer – not just because their usage of your service determines your success, but because more and more we’re seeing bottom-up adoption of technology displacing top-down deployments. New enterprise services that leverage a freemium business model can operate at internet-scale, growing to millions of users as rapidly as the latest hip consumer application. Just look at Yammer, which is doubling revenue every quarter. Startups now have an unprecedented opportunity to disrupt traditional enterprise vendors. Massive Innovation in the Enterprise The latest crop of enterprise software companies are approaching business problems with the agility, speed and mindset of consumer startups, bringing explosive innovation to a traditionally stagnant, slow-moving market. To retain customers in this incredibly competitive landscape, you’re forced to build better technology – technology that customers love, is easy to implement and available across devices. It’s Moore’s Law on steroids, forcing you to constantly innovate and improve your technology at an unprecedented pace. At Box, we push updates that are incremental and sometimes monumental every week without interruption to our users or their IT departments, unlike SharePoint’s three-year release cycles and occasional patches that place the burden on the IT staff. How is all this innovation translating to how users and businesses operate? Enterprises are now getting a real-time, holistic view of content and conversations within their business through activity feeds from Salesforce, Yammer, Jive and others. They’re experiencing more seamless interaction between the desktop and browser with HTML5-powered content viewing and editing, and drag and drop uploading from Google, Scribd, and more. They’re realizing the long overdue promise of the “mobile workforce,” thanks to sophisticated business applications that let them collaborate and communicate from mobile devices and the iPad. There’s more ground-breaking innovation going on in enterprise startups today than most of the consumer web; we just don’t see it because we’re conditioned to think enterprise software is dull. Culture and Execution Matter More Than Size Not surprisingly, company culture at these new enterprise software contenders looks a lot more like their consumer counterparts than the enterprise behemoths they’re attempting to disrupt. Rather than trying to build aggressive sales teams, many enterprise software startups are focusing on product execution as the best means of acquiring customers. The days of “elephant hunting” are quickly disappearing (it always seemed strange to associate customer relationships with killing large and mostly-friendly mammals, but what do I know?). Consumption and subscription-based billing, in contrast to the traditional licensing model, forces vendors to build amazing software that your customers need and use, not just software that you can sell better than anyone else. In today’s world, you only get paid if people are using your product. Furthermore, without the hooks of costly infrastructure and rigid licensing, scaling in size is no longer an excuse for slowing down. In the highly democratized, competitive world of the Web, companies that let their bulk get in the way of innovation and user experience will quickly see a customer and employee exodus. Salesforce is sexier today having passed the $1B annual revenue mark than it was a decade ago because it has continued to innovate and build a culture around its core mission: “The End of Software.” SuccessFactors has aged gracefully to become one of the leading SaaS cloud companies by executing against five founding principles that include “No Jerks!” NetSuite, Taleo, LogMeIn and SolarWinds have also managed to maintain their sex appeal through recent successful IPOs. Others like Cast Iron and Greenplum have been snapped up in a recent wave of acquisitions as giants like IBM and EMC try to spice up their images and offerings. So how can today’s business software vendors, as they grow, see similar success? 1. Make customers feel like they’re a part of your company — all enterprise vendors could all learn a little from Zappos We’re going through a major shift in the technology landscape. Yes, photo sharing is fun, but the upside of creating the eighth service that lets you post photos of yourself to the web is becoming smaller than solving massive problems for enterprises. Organizations have unprecedented amounts of data, global and virtual workforces, and markets that change in real-time. It’s easier and more compelling than ever before to build, launch, and sell scalable enterprise solutions. There are billions of dollars to be made just by keeping it (don’t hate me) sexy. Information provided by CrunchBase      
Source: TechCrunch | 25 Jul 2010 | 9:59 am Apple launches free bumper program (Appolicious)Appolicious - Apple (AAPL) released instructions on how iPhone 4 owners can claim a free bumper. And that nifty Flipboard app? It may not last too long. All this and more in today's App Industry Roundup.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 Jul 2010 | 9:22 am Funny, smart commentary about burqa bansObserver columnist David Mitchell (half of the comedy team Mitchell and Webb is in fine form today with this column on the absurdity of burqa banning. It was one of those bits of the Sunday paper that had me stopping to read a passage aloud to my wife every ten seconds or so until she snatched it out of my hands and read it herself.If Britain decides to ban the burqa I might just start wearing one (Image: IMG_1763, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from kansai's photostream)  Source: Boing Boing | 25 Jul 2010 | 9:17 am Oil Well 'Kill' Delayed, BP Chief Reportedly to ResignThe work to plug BP's leaky oil well got back on track Sunday as the skies cleared and crews raced to plug the well for good.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 25 Jul 2010 | 9:09 am Energy Department Has a New Commitment to Solar (and a New Blog)The Department of Energy launched a new blog last week, the aptly named (yet uninspiring) Energy Blog. Among other announcements and musings (OK, really more statements than deep thoughts) is a call to develop three Energy Innovation Hubs, one of which will drive research to turn sunlight into fuels.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 25 Jul 2010 | 8:35 am Rumor: Samsung Epic 4G to launch August 20Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones
One of the highly anticipated Android devices for the Sprint network, the Samsung Epic 4G, is rumored to launch August 20. Basically, Samsung uploads a promotional video on Samsung’s Galaxy S On Demand Live Show for every Galaxy S phone that launches. Samsung launched a video for the Samsung Vibrant on July 21 (because that was the official launch date before moving up) and for the Samsung Captivate on July 19 (the first business day after its Sunday launch). Therefore, we have good reason to believe the video debut for the Epic 4G will, in fact, be its actual launch date. So far, Samsung plans to air the Epic 4G video on August 20, implying the smartphone has a strong chance of launching on that Friday. In addition, Samsung has tweeted a message saying the device is arriving in a few weeks. The tweet can be seen below, but here is what the text states:
While the tweet alone doesn’t confirm much, we have another Samsung tweet calling for a summer release. August 20 is towards the end of summer by American standards, so if history repeats itself, Android enthusiasts should plan on the Epic 4G arriving on August 20. Read [Samsung]
Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 25 Jul 2010 | 8:25 am WikiLeaks Drops 77,000 War Docs; Fingers Pakistan as Insurgent AllyTurns out "Collateral Murder" was just a warm-up. WikiLeaks just published a trove of over 90,000 mostly-classified U.S. military documents that details a strengthening Afghan insurgency with deep ties to Pakistani intelligence.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 25 Jul 2010 | 7:49 am Remnants of Lost Polar Expedition SoughtA team of Canadian archaeologists is leading an expedition to find two British vessels that shipwrecked in the Canadian Arctic more than 150 years ago.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 25 Jul 2010 | 7:17 am LHC Gaining In The Hunt For Elusive ParticleThe Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is giving physicists hopeful candidates in the hunt for the heaviest elementary particle known to science. According to BBC News, so far their observations have been leading them in that direction.If the observations can be confirmed, it would be a first for Europe as the top quark particle has only been generated in one lab in the US. Dr Arnaud Lucotte, from the French National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS), said the discovery could help physicists in the hunt for the elusive Higgs boson -- the God particle. The details of the top quark candidates were presented at The International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP), which runs from July 22 to 28 in Paris. The LHC is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), based in Geneva, near the French-Swiss border. Several possible detections of top quarks have been recently made by the LHC’s Atlas and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments. Atlas has detected nine collision events compatible with the top quark; CMS has made 3 to 4 observations of possible candidates. Physicists stressed, however, that more data was needed in order to support the conclusive observation of top quark production. A detection of top quarks would represent a small milestone for CERN, which is making steady progress after the accident which forced it to shut down for 14 months shortly after it was turned on in 2008. The top quark was discovered in 1995 by the Tevatron accelerator, operated by Fermilab in Illinois. Since then, the US accelerator has produced them in abundance. But they have never been produced outside Fermilab. Tim Christiansen said, in a presentation at ICHEP, that events observed by the CMS experiment included one “striking” top quark candidate. Dr Lucotte told BBC News that the top quark was “well coupled” to the Higgs boson. In other words, there is thought to be a special interaction between these two particles. Despite trying to produce the Higgs for decades, particle physicists have so far failed in that attempt. The Higgs boson is crucial to the current theory which has been conceived to explain the interactions of sub-atomic particles, known as the Standard Model. Rival physicists working at the Tevatron accelerator in the US, however, now believe the Higgs is within reach. They hope to detect the elusive particle themselves, especially if the Tevatron’s lifetime can be extended to 2014, which is currently under discussion.If the Higgs boson exists in a form known as the charged Higgs, Dr Lucotte explained, the top quark could be crucial to detecting it. Elementary particles generated at colliders “decay“, or transform, into other sub-atomic particles, which may or may not be stable. The close coupling of the charged Higgs to the top quark means that, if the Higgs boson is heavier than the top quark, it might reveal itself by decaying into a top quark and another particle known as a b-quark. If the Higgs is lighter, then the top quark might decay into a Higgs and a b-quark. Other physicists foresee a different type of Higgs, one which fits the restrictions of the Standard Model. The top quark might also act as the originator for so-called “super-symmetric” particles. These would represent an entirely new class of particles, predicted to exist by theorists, but which have yet to be observed at particle accelerators. ---On the Net:Large Hadron ColliderCNRSInternational Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP)CERNFermilabSource: RedOrbit News - Science | 25 Jul 2010 | 7:08 am Rig Headed Back To Gulf Spill SiteA drill rig headed back to the site of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill on Saturday after reports that an oncoming storm had weakened, as officials raced to restart drilling a relief well to permanently “kill” the leaking well. The Development Driller 3, assigned to drill the relief well, had been evacuated from the area as Tropical Storm Bonnie headed for the region. But the storm weakened to a tropical depression by Saturday. “The Development Driller 3 (DD3) is on its way back,” BP spokesman Bryan Ferguson told AFP. A cap placed over the wellhead on July 15 has closed off the leaking oil, but final operations to seal the well for good were halted when forecasters announced the storm was headed for the Gulf. Retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the US official overseeing the spill response, said an evacuation could set back efforts to finally stop the leaking well by up to 12 days. But the storm weakened as it crossed Florida moving west from the Caribbean, and several ships, some operating underwater surveillance robots, had not even left the site by the time the DD3 began heading back. Ferguson said it would take about 21 hours to reconnect the DD3 to drilling operations some 5,000 feet down on the sea floor. BP and US officials are currently assessing two options to kill the well. The first is a static kill plan that involves pumping heavy drilling fluids through the blowout preventer valve system that sits on top of the well, and then injecting cement to seal it. The process is similar to a “top kill” attempt that failed, but officials say the cap placed over the leak will make the operation easier and more likely to succeed. The second option uses the same process as the static kill, pumping drilling fluid via the relief well until the flow of crude is overcome, allowing the damaged well to be sealed with cement. As crews work to contain and clean up the spill, federal investigators examining its causes heard Friday from a former rig worker who said alarms on the Deepwater Horizon rig had been muted. Mike Williams, the chief electronics technician on the rig said an alarm that should have alerted workers to a deadly build-up of gas had been “inhibited” so that false alarms would not wake sleeping crew members. Rig owner Transocean has said the configuration was “intentional” and conformed to maritime practice. ---Image Caption: Development Driller III, Q4000, Discoverer Enterprise on the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Credit: U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Patrick Kelley.---On the Net:BPGovernment Response WebsiteSource: RedOrbit News - Science | 25 Jul 2010 | 6:55 am
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HTC confirmed via press release today that newer versions of their Desire and Nexus One phones will ship with Sony-built “Super LCDs” rather than Samsung’s AMOLED screens.
Michael Warring, president of American Educational Products in Fort Collins, Colo., had his shipment all ready: A school's worth of small bags, each one filled with an igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rock. Then the school canceled its order. Says Warring, "They apparently decided rocks could be harmful to children."... The children will study a poster of rocks instead...
Get out of the way, old man! You’re being Disrupted! Screw you, newspapers: blogs are stealing your readers and Craigslist is pillaging your revenue! Take that publishers: Andrew Wiley 
This guest post was written by 
Governments and legislatures shouldn't tell people what they can and can't wear. By doing so, they would, in every sense, be taking a massive liberty. As long as people aren't wearing crotchless jeans outside primary schools or deely boppers with attached sparklers on petrol station forecourts, we've all got the right to wear exactly what the hell we like and I can barely believe that we're having this debate.
