Face it. Loving Star Trek is about as dorky as a dork can get. But one Star Trek fan had the last laugh when he sold his one bedroom flat for more than five times the market value. Tony Alleyne sold his home that he transformed into the deck of the starship Voyager for a staggering $843,242 or £425,000. As you would imagine, transforming your bachelor pad into a flight deck is not an easy (or cheap) task. Tony spent nearly £30,000 and eight-hours a day for two years working on the project. When completed, he went and did what any shrewd businessman would do: he sold it on eBay. Tony hasn’t announced his next project, but a Pirate-themed home would be pretty badass to say the least. Star Trek fan soldly goes… [MAKE] → Read More
The man in purple has announced that his first new single, “Guitar” from the upcoming “Planet Earth” album, has arrived. Fans can get the single starting today when they use Verizon Wireless’ free new V CAST Song ID to identify the single. To get the track you’ll have to download the Song ID app to a V Cast Music-enable phones, then from your PC go to the Verizon Wireless music site where you play the interactive video and hold the phone to the speaker. This will identify the song, which you can then download for free. Yes, this sounds like a lot of work… but it’s music fit for a king, make that from Prince. Verizon Wireless Music → Read More
Nothing beats free stuff. Whether it’s a free ice cream cone or a free iPod, both are just so, so sweet. Those of you who still shell out $1000 a year to upgrade your PC for games will be happy to know that Valve and ATI have struck a bit of a deal that runs in your favor. Owners of ATI RadeonT graphics cards will be able to download free games from Valve’s Steam service. So you have a RadeonT card and want to get your download on? Right now, you can get Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch via Steam for the cost of absolutely nothing. Steam will also be packaged with ATI graphics cards from now until 2008. Sounds like a good deal. You can get the full nitty gritty by visiting this site. Free Steam games for all ATI Radeon card users [Strategy Informer] → Read More
The Business Software Alliance — the Ladies Against Women of the IT set — found out that the average Azerbaijani has over $250 worth of pirated software on his or her computer. Second in the list is Iceland with about $225 and America and China eat it big time because we steal $7.2 billion and $5.4 billion from Bill Gates’ mewling mouth every time we hit the Pirate Bay. Cry us a river, BSA. → Read More
This guest post is written by David Sacks, the founder and CEO of new startup Geni. Previously, he was COO of PayPal. He also produced the movie “Thank You For Smoking.” For the last several years, Yahoo, MSN and AOL have all suffered a declining share of pageviews, but that does not mean the portal is going out of style. Rather it has been redefined, first by Google, and now by Facebook in potentially even more profound ways. The core question a portal needs to answer for a user is “How do I find the information I need?” In the early days of the web, the answer was browsing, which made sense when there were a limited number of useful sites. (Remember when it was a big deal for Yahoo to put the “New!” or “Recommended” icon next to a website’s name in their directory?) But as the number of websites became infinite, search replaced browsing as the dominant paradigm for finding new sites, and Yahoo’s failure to keep up in this area allowed Google to take the lead. Google has continued to leverage its lead in search to become a full-fledged portal. Once users have found what they are looking for, Google makes it easy, through their iGoogle product, to subscribe to that content through alerts, RSS feeds, or a huge selection of widgets, all of which are compacting more useful information onto fewer start pages than ever before. As a result, iGoogle has become Google’s fastest-growing product. But iGoogle has a serious limitation: it doesn’t involve sharing; each user has to make an individual investment in set-up and can’t benefit from the work of others. It’s not really a Web 2.0 product. Facebook has a new answer to the portal question. The “social graph,” or your network of relationships, will push information to you. You’ll learn from your friends. Thanks to Facebook’s new developer platform, the types of information being disseminated now include not just news, photos, events, and groups but also music, videos, books, movies, causes, political campaigns — and the list is rapidly growing into almost every conceivable category. The advantage of this approach is that it makes it relatively effortless for users to access a world of information that is both increasingly comprehensive and personal to them. Even if all this information were available through search (and it’s not), search actually requires work; the user → Read More
Sorry for the delay, folks, but I wanted to make sure I gave you all a chance to come up with something to really make us LOL. A few of you made me chuckle and I give you props for that. Keep it up everyone. There won’t be a prize today, but there will be tomorrow! The commenter who really, really makes us LOL will win a set of Rhino Skin iPod Shuffle Accents. I know the prize is minuscule, but we’ll see how this works out and we’ll up the ante next week. You could win a Belkin Wifi Skype phone. In any case, here are yesterday’s top three comments. Ilya has been extremely diligent with all sorts of comments the last few weeks and last night was no different. Anyone who bashes on Microsoft is an automatic favorite in my book and the BTOD is funny in and of itself. Not to worry, this will be ironed out in Table Pack 2 → Read More
The things that Google comes up with are pretty scary. The Street View on Google Maps is pretty cool, but it’s starting to feel a lot like Big Brother around here. It appears that when searching for images you now have the ability to get pictures of just faces by adding this tid-bit to your search, “&imgtype=face”. Voila, stalking on the internet has gotten that much easier. I apologize if anyone has an epileptic seizure because of the image. Google enables face recognition in Image Search? [Lifehacker] → Read More
Last week, we discussed Ezra Chatterton and his World of Warcraft wishes. The boy got all he could ever ask for and the dudes in Blizzard really hooked him up with some cool gear. Now Blzzard is going one step further and is giving Ezra his very own Phoenix flying mount. Yeah, this kid went and got a friggin’ phoenix to fly around on without having to run some instance 600 times. So what makes this Phoenix mount so special? I’d say a 310% speed increase does. That combined with the fact that Ezra owns the very first one makes this a prize he’ll never forget – especially since his middle name is indeed “Phoenix”. Absolutely wonderful to hear. Now that Ezra has gotten his loot, any way we can get one of those slick Phoenix mounts Blizzard? The Phoenix Mount is indeed in game — with Ezra! [WoW Insider] → Read More
http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/452319854 I really have to see Palm’s Foleo before I begin ragging on it, but this new not-a-laptop just wasn’t doing it for me. The video above gives us a better idea of what’s up here, but come on, Palm. Amaze us this year. → Read More
Sony’s released PSP firmware 3.5 in Japan, which lets users remotely access their PS3 content. As long as it’s connected to a Wi-Fi hotspot, the PSP will be able to view all the videos, music and pictures found on the PS3. Last week‘s PS3 firmware update made this all possible. → Read More
Big fan of music videos? Of course you are. So you’ll be extremely pleased to know that Warner Music will be offering its entire catalog of music videos online for free. The label is working with digital services provider Premium TV to create online media hubs where viewers can watch clips and videos of their favorite artist. Warner is using video advertising as well so that they can cash in on your pageviews. But it gets a little better. You’ll be able to download music videos after viewing them for a small fee. Now, if these videos are DRM-free and not encoded in some crappy Windows Media Player format, then Warner Music is basically taking on both iTunes and YouTube with its selection of videos. The possibilities are there. Let’s see if Warner makes the right move, which, chances are, it won’t. Warner to put ad-supported video archive online [Reuters] → Read More
http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/452319854 Actually, they kind of like each other. Just listen to the gentle lilt of Steve’s voice and observe the shy smile on Bill’s face. Imagine being a fly on the wall back in the green room *wavy TV picture and music* “Well, this is it, Bill?” Steve smooths out his turtleneck and rubs off some lint with an iRoller. “PI!” says Bill, putting down his iPaq. He then reverse-engineers OS X and then includes WinFS into the core. → Read More
FreeRange Communications has just released FreeRanger WebReader; a new downloadable app that provides news, blogs, stock prices and other information for mobile consumption, and runs in the background, pulling down quick bites of information or full stories. Internet information is tracked and downloaded automatically for reading at a later time, so the content can be browsed even when there is no signal or if the device is in “wireless off” mode. WebReader is available for Blackberry, Symbian and a variety of J2ME phones. A free version will support up to 10 sites, while an advanced version offers unlimited Web feed capability for $39.95 per year. FreeRange WebReader → Read More
I first wrote about Israeli widget site Gizmoz in December 2006. At the time, the company hadn’t launched its product to create personalized widgets using users’ pictures and voice, but they had a working demo. Today, the product launches for everyone to use. Gizmoz is also announcing a $6.3 million Series A funding round from Benchmark Capital and Columbia Capital and distribution partnerships with RockYou and Freewebs. These are animated, talking, 3D images that can be embedded on any website. When compared to what Sitepal and others are doing on the avatar side of things, or Snapvine in the voice recording space, it really shines (see, however, Sitepal’s comment in our previous post for a different viewpoint). Creating a Gizmoz takes about a minute and requires a single photo of the subject. Gizmoz renders a 3D image of the photo. Users then customize it by adding hair, body, accessories, clothes, etc., and can also distort the face in a number of ways. When you add your voice, via a microphone or by typing in text that is converted to audio. the avatar adds facial expressions, eye blinks, breathing and lip syncs to the voice. Here’s an example using my photo: http://www.gizmoz.com//newsite/swf/newFlvViewer2.swf The key uses for the product will be to create a welcome clip like the one above, or to create a welcome “voicemail” service where people visiting your site can leave audio messages (like Snapvine). Gizmoz is built on the Flash platform; however, like Flektor, which was recently acquired by MySpace, all of the code was developed in-house by CEO Eyal Gever and his team over the last four years. That will make it an even more attractive acquisition target for MySpace and others. The company has also created a cool personalized demo showcasing the announcement: http://download.gizmoz.com/home/techcrunch.swf → Read More
Remember those “save a buck or two” commercials? With MOBIVOX you won’t just save a dollar, you can actually earn bucks too. The Mobile VoIP service, which works from just about any cellular phone, is running a viral promotion where users get $1 of MOBIVOX credit for each friend they get to sign up. OK, this might not be the same thing as a dollar in your pocket, but it will pay for some of the long distance calls you make. This VoIP service bypasses the PC, and works with almost any phone in usage today. The basic service is free, and international rates outside of the MOBIVOX community are what the company calls “competitive.” But if you earn free bucks, those calls won’t cost you anything either. MOBIVOX → Read More
Are ads going to pay for mobile content? That’s the analysis coming from Red Orbit, which reports that the UK mobile network market has taken its first fully-fledged steps towards the ad-funded model. And other European carriers, such as Blyk, a pan-European network, will soon offer free mobile phone calls and text messaging services for free in return for accepting advertising on handsets. This business model is being aimed at the 16 to 24-year old market, one that has less disposable income for making calls, but one that still tends to gab it up considerably. According to Red Orbit, Blyk will work closely with advertisers to pioneer more creative ads, and further track these ads in real time to allow the advertisers to view and adjust their ads accordingly. Ad-Funding Looms for Mobile Realm [Red Orbit] → Read More
A new report from Visant Strategies finds that the market for legacy mobile switching vendors will remain strong, even as there is a move to I/P-based switching. The report suggests the continued deployment of CDMA EV-DO, WCDMA/HSDPA and GSM/GPRS/EDGE base stations will lead to a market for all mobile network components at an ever-increasing rate. Global softswitch sales could reach more than $6 billion in 2011, while IP-based and IMS-based gear could see revenues nearly double that amount in the same year. Visant Strategies → Read More
Who has the best mobile game load process? According to Strategy Analytics Wireless Media Lab the honor goes to Verizon Wireless, beating rivals AT&T/Cingular, Helio and Sprint. This new study found that Cingular — we mean AT&T – received the lowest rating in four categories including: ease of task completion, process logic, time take, and ease of task duplication. Hopefully with the name change AT&T can do better next time. This year Verizon Wireless scored an impressive 91/100 overall. So if you’re going to get in the game with a mobile device Verizon Wireless is the arena of choice. Report: Verizon Wireless Offers Best Game Download Experience [Via Games on Deck] → Read More
LG Patents MP3-playing Washing Machine WiFi Slurpr: The Ultimate WiFi Tool QiGO Internet Content Keys Top Ten Cool Potential Surface Gadgets Google Maps Intros Street View → Read More
What’s cooler than lolcats? That’s actually a trick question since nothing is cooler than lolcats. But this will, at least, get you wetter than lolcats (presumably). The Kohler WaterHaven is a $3,300 showering monstrosity. It features seven water outlets. Yes, seven holes from which it can blow its watery load all over you. The WaterHaven holds two shower heads, four body sprays and one hand shower. Be careful though, accidents happen: → Read More
