Since the launch of the new Zune store and the advent of XNA development for Zunes, there has apparently been quite a lot of activity. I’ve been waiting for a nice omnibus post like this one to point me in the right direction. You’ve got your tetris, you’ve got your solitaire, you’ve even got a chat app — although if your Zune is close enough to another Zune that you can communicate, you’re probably better off talking than tapping out letter after letter on its little pad. Go, Zunatics! Download and see what’s must-have. I personally am going to get me a little Tetris. [thanks for the tip, Mike!] → Read More
Internet Broadcasting, a local media network for broadcast publishers, announced today the official launch of Slantly, an online opinion tool. Slantly is intended for web publishers to integrate into their site to create discussions and spark debate. Several major web publishers have already partnered with Slantly to use the tool, including Meredith Publishing and NYCtv. Slantly offers several key features to online publishers. With their customizable polls, publishers are able to create polls on news and issues to engage their readers. Through these polls, users can vote and add comments to a forum attached to each poll, after they vote. These polls and discussions, while hosted on each publisher’s site, are all available on the Slantly site. A very useful feature to publishers is the ability to track the demographics of your voters and commenters. All of this is available on the Publisher Dashboard, where you can create, moderate, and manage your discussions, track activity, and customize the look and functionality of your discussions to match your site. Slantly also offers an open API, enabling publishers to customize the tool to suit their needs. I’ve included a widget from Slantly that rotates through several popular opinions. var SLANTLY = (typeof SLANTLY!= “undefined”) ? SLANTLY : {}; SLANTLY.embedconfig={ version:”1.1″, topic: “Technology”, layout: “custom”, width: “100%”, height: “250″, query_type: “top-opinions” }; There are several competing online opinion sites, in the form of polling sites like Polldaddy, Survey Monkey, dPolls, SodaHead (recently received new funding, covered here), and Vizu. Slantly does offer a similar service, but a bit differently. After playing around with the site a bit, they focus more on the opinions, not the polls. Given the nature of the associated sites (local news outlets), the audience is a bit older, and presumably a bit more opinionated and educated. This allows for more consistent users, as opposed to SodaHead, for example, which is marketed mainly for MySpace pages. Internet Broadcasting, a company established in 1996, has been leading the market in local media online solutions. Originally, a web development company for major TV stations, IB saw the potential in the local media market. They have developed a system to optimize the way TV stations converge with the web to enable viewers to access and interact with the local news. Their network currently reaches 16 million unique visitors per month nationwide. Some of their clients include Hearst-Argyle Television Inc., Mcgraw-Hill Broadcasting, NBC, Meredith → Read More
For most people on the Web, if Google or Yahoo cannot find something, it doesn’t exist. That has been one of the biggest drawbacks to creating a Website or application that displays itself as a Flash (SWF) file. Search engines could see the file, but they could not see what was in it. Until now. Adobe has come up with a way for the search engines to read SWF files and index all of the information they contain. That means any text or links in a Flash application can now be indexed. This is a huge step forward for Adobe and anyone who develops in Flash/Flex. Michele Turner, Adobe’s VP of marketing for its platform business, explains: We are releasing technology to Google and Yahoo that enables them to crawl and index SWF files. They are now searchable. This will open up millions of Flash files to search. Adobe has created a special Flash player for the search engines that acts like a virtual user going through each application. It actually goes through the runtime of each Flash application and translates it into something the search engines can understand. So all of those fancy interactive Flash Websites and other rich Internet applications that have been invisible to search engines, can now be seen by them. Turner acknowledges that this invisibility so far “has been a big problem for those developing rich applications.” After all, it doesn’t matter how pretty your Website is if nobody can find it. Flash applications and Websites (many ironically created by ad agencies) have not been able to take advantage of any of the search-engine juice that so many online ad campaigns depend upon. This should be seen as part of Adobe’s larger efforts to remove any remaining restrictions associated with Flash (in April, for instance, it opened up the Flash runtime as part of its the Open Screen Project). Google is already rolling out the SWF-indexing technology, while Yahoo still “has some work to do,” says Turner. Even so, this won’t solve all the problems with Flash content showing up on search engines. Becoming visible is one thing, actually ranking highly is another. Google currently can find about 73 million Flash files on the Web. But until Adobe makes it easy for the average Webmaster or blogger to link deeply into those Flash files, they are not likely to appear at the top of many → Read More
I can think of two reasons of the top of my head why the PC is the right platform for casual gamers. People just getting into gaming, first of all, don’t even own a console, but they almost certainly own a computer (and let’s be honest, a lot are playing at work). That tips the scales already — your target audience self-selects. Secondly, gateway casual games are ones that utilize interfaces people already know. Pointing and clicking, or basic four-directional movement, things that don’t overwhelm soccer moms. Hence the success of games like Bejeweled and Diner Dash. Ubisoft’s lead game designer Emeric Thoa appears to think along these lines as well. With the casual market expanding, it’s worth checking out a few baskets before putting all your eggs into one (small game developers don’t have the budget for multi-platform releases) — and the PC at this point is the winner by far. → Read More
Lithium Technologies, an online enterprise communities solutions provider, has raised a $12 million in a Series B equity round led by Benchmark Capital. Lithium had previously raised $9 million in a Series A in April 2007, which was co-led by Shasta Ventures and Emergence Capital. Lithium provides on-demand solutions for enterprise communities, providing social networks, forums, live chat, instant messaging and other social tools. They also provide API’s and an analytics solution all on-demand through their platform. Lithium-built communities are being used by 10.6 million average users per day across all their customers, and they have on average 2.2 billion messages sent per month. Some Lithium clients include PayPal, Dell, Symantec, AT&T, Playstation, and Barnes & Noble. Lithium says that they will be using this funding to expand their social media service offerings and a more agressive business development approach (ie. the ‘bring in the sales guys’ phase). Lithium has a solid approach and track record, and is an easy route for building an insta-community around a brand or website. It is a space that is getting more and more competitive with a number of both self-install and hosted options available. CrunchBase Information Lithium Technologies Benchmark Capital Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Eric Lempel, Director of PlayStation Network Operations, has put up three fun-filled posts to the official PlayStation blog. The first post is about XMB access in-game and features a video of how it will look. It should make it easier to check messages from friends without having to leave the game. The second post also had a video but this one was less exciting, since it was about the Trophy system. I really don’t understand that point of showing off little icons (the trophies) to your friends. I guess the whole system really isn’t for me. The last post Eric did was a nice FAQ with some of the common questions people have been asking about the update. For example, fans of hot inter-console cybering ask: Will voice-messaging/private chat be featured in 2.40 as well? If not, can we expect to see this feature added in the future? We are evaluating the opportunity to offer voice chat, but for this update, we wanted to focus on text messaging as the key priority for communications that our users have asked for. Oh baby, I love it when you blog dirty! Expect the update around July 2nd. → Read More
Microsoft today announced that after 2 years, their Office Live Small Business app had broken through the million subscriber mark. With one million businesses now managing their website, email and documents using OfficeLive, Microsoft have firmed up their position as a provider of online tools for the small business market against competition from Google and a host of others. At the same time today over at Pingdom they noticed that the search mind-share for ‘web hosting’ is continuing its downward trend. Generic hosting seems to be on it’s way out – the type of hosting that can be purchased from GoDaddy, 1&1 and many others where the basic plan offers a control panel, a shared host and some bandwidth. Generic hosting is not only being replaced by services such as Office Live and Google Apps, but for personal user networks such as WordPress.com and Blogger. For an SMB, there are a number of easy options available that require little development work and setup time with integration into other applications such as document management. The downward trend in generic hosting in favor of more specialized and integrated platforms will also definitely cut into the SMB web development market, as each of these solutions provide default templates that are easily branded and customized with a corporate identity. With a million customers over at Microsoft and Google winning large contracts for million-plus user Gmail installs, the battle for the online app hosting in the SMB space is certainly only getting started. While Google have apps for domain, they are yet to fully integrate some of their other properties into the service such as Google Pages. Concurrently, Microsoft are yet to rollout, or even confirm or deny the existance or planning for a full web-based office application suite, but it is undoubtedly in the pipeline. CrunchBase Information Microsoft Google Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
I don’t know how they ever believed this would work. How could they not have tried this? But really, it’s strengthening my belief about how technology advances in Japan. Briefly: Here in the United States, we get trickle-down tech. It’s a hand-me-down from the feudal system, I think: some lab-rats test the hell out of a product until they think it’s ready for us, then we graciously accept it as proven and ready. In Japan it’s a little more democratic: someone takes an idea, prototypes it, and immediately deploys it, regardless of how flawed or ridiculous it is. Videophones? Alive and flourishing. Underpants vending machines? Weird, and probably flourishing. Age verification camera? Fail. They just put it out there and it failed. They accidentally sold some kids some cigarettes (at least they didn’t sell them panties) and now they’re working on something better. The system works! → Read More
Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp subsidiary that controls most of its online assets, has signed a 12 year lease agreement for a new facility in Playa Vista. All FIM companies in Southern California will move to the new facility starting in June of 2009. For those wondering about FIM and MySpace’s future growth, this move should settle speculation. The site will house over 300,000 square feet of commercial space and is part of a development called Horizon at Playa Vista (a rendering of the development is above). The area is quickly becoming LA’s media hub, with EA, Rubin Postaer and others now with offices in the area. The internal memo from Peter Levinsohn, President of Fox Interactive Media, is below. About a year ago, I communicated with you about our space and parking challenges, and our ultimate plan to find a facility that could accommodate all of our LA-area team in one location. After an extensive process, I’m thrilled to inform you that we have found the ideal location for Fox Interactive Media’s new headquarters. The new facility is located in Playa Del Rey (Horizon at Playa Vista http://www.horizonatplayavista.com/) and houses more than 300,000 square feet of commercial space. Playa Del Rey is the first newly-built community in Los Angeles in over 50 years and has become a creative hub for technology companies, including EA, the largest video game company in the world. The site itself should be amazing – including an exclusive gym, internal and external eating facilities, volleyball courts, and lots of green space for outdoor activities. Just beyond the newly-built facility will be a host of restaurants, shopping locations and living options. FIM has experienced phenomenal success in its three-year history, and we have plans for even greater growth and achievements in the coming fiscal year. Given our tremendous track record, it’s only fitting that we should enter into the single biggest real-estate transaction in Los Angeles in the last 25 years. When we move to our new facility between June of 2009 and January of 2010, not only will we enjoy the distinction of having one of the largest corporate headquarters in the LA area, but we will be housed in a state-of-the-art facility that reflects our corporate identity and culture. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be providing you with more information about the site and the surrounding area. We’ll also provide a → Read More
eWeek is reporting a rumor that Facebook are about to begin the move away from leased colocation to building out their own datacenters. What we do already know is that late last year Facebook leased out 10,000sq feet of datacenter space at a new facility built by DuPont Fabros Technology in Ashburn, Viginia, alongside both Yahoo! and MySpace. The lease coincided with a $240M investment from Microsoft which was announced at around the same time as the datacenter lease was organized. More recently, they raised a further $100M in March of this year specifically for infrastructure spend. With Facebook now at beyond 10,000 live web servers, they are certainly able to reap greater benefits and cost efficiencies through building out their own hosting centers and infrastructure. With over half-a-billion dollars in funding, it certainly seems that Facebook are well into building out their own datacenters and infrastructure, with what is likely commodity hardware components for servers and a custom application stack. Facebook have also owned their own very large IP address space for a long time now and have managed it themselves. Facebook use well-known technology stack, with Linux, PHP and MySQL. They claim to run one of the largest MySQL instances on the planet, and have contributed a number of patches to various open source projects. Vendors looking to line up Facebook may face a bit of a challenge, as like Google, they seem to keep a lot in house and build on open source (there were event rumors recently that Google were now even building their own switches). CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
I’ve actually been looking for pictures like this for ages. I find SLRs and lenses very fascinating, but it wasn’t until I saw a lens cut open like this in the window of a shop in Paris that I understood just how complicated they are. You ask what you’re paying for when you buy a really good prime lens or a $1000 zoom; you’re looking at it. The first picture is cool, as it shows how they’ve managed to create a hybrid in the DSLR; after all, the mechanical element needs to remain the same, but they have to fit a whole PCB, card mechanism and LCD in there as well. Love this stuff. Photos by the linked article’s author, Charlie Sorrel → Read More
AppleInsider is reporting today that a recent survey from investment bank RBC Capital Markets shows that over 50% of consumers looking to purchase a smartphone in the next 90 days are likely to purchase the new 3G iPhone which is scheduled for release on the 11th of July. Symbian currently enjoys 65% of smartphone market share (53% Nokia), with Windows on 13% and RIM on 12%. With over 35M smartphones being sold each quarter, Apple could expect to ship over 15M iPhone 2.0 devices in the first quarter after release. To gain market share and accelerate past Windows and RIM, the iPhone would only need to sustain a 50% sale rate for two consecutive quarters. The iPhone market share for smartphone (or ‘converged’ devices) is currently at 7%, so the iPhone 2.0 could double, based on this survey, Apple market share relatively quickly. Nokia shipped 60.5 Million smartphones in 2007, and it set to break the 100M device barrier for 2008. Apple have a very long way to go to surplant Nokia and Symbian, but the same survey reports that only 2% of respondants were considering purchasing a Nokia smartphone. Nokia is very strong internationally, but for the first time the new iPhone will see a very broad international launch on the 11th of July – launching in 21 markets including all of the big smartphone markets. The iPhone 2.0 will therefor not have the disadvantage its predecessor had – strong sales in the USA but a lag in releases to other international markets. The smartphone market is going to be transformed throughout the next 12 months – not only because of the iPhone and Mac OS X but also because of the upcoming Andriod from Google, and Microsoft releasing frequent updates for Windows mobile. Defensive moves from Nokia via the open sourcing of Symbian and the ever-present RIM are always threatening to the new entrants and incumbants, although it seems that they are both losing market share to the iPhone, especially with the new enterprise features of the iPhone 2.0. While currently Nokia leads RIM, Windows and then Apple and others – in a very short time we could see a huge shift in the smartphone platform market of the likes that were never imagined possible in the desktop PC market. Statistics and numbers for this post were taken from Canalys Market Reports CrunchBase Information iPhone 3G Information provided → Read More
FriendFeed, the popular social network feed aggregator, has released a new version of its site that has been optimized for the iPhone. While FriendFeed has always featured a relatively spartan design, the standard version sports small fonts that make text difficult to read on the iPhone’s screen. The new version has increased the font size, and has further tweaked link placement and picture sizes to make the site more accessible to mobile users. The site also includes a new “Post photos from your phone” link that will let users submit photos to FriendFeed straight from their iPhone. Each user is assigned a unique email address (something like jason+nota483realone@mail2ff.com). To submit a picture, users simply send photos chosen from the iPhone’s integrated photo viewer to the assigned address. The feature works well, but you’ll need to manually enter the obfuscated email address – there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to save it to your address book. You can read more details at the the official announcement here. CrunchBase Information FriendFeed Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Flickr’d So this is sorta surprising. Despite how seemingly popular the Batman movies have been, that awful one starring George Clooney notwithstanding, they don’t seem to make all that much money. Adjusted for inflation, the first movie is still box office king with $436.4 million at the box office. Batman Begins pulled in $226.3 million. The worst, of course, was that Clooney stinker, Batman and Robin, which did only $143.7 million at the box office. Worse, it actually cost the studio money! Yup, nothing like a -14 percent return on investment to nearly kill a franchise. I’d complain that the Dark Knight comes out in Spain, where I’ll be, on August 13, a full month after it comes out in the U.S., but who’d listen? (Was that even a sentence?) → Read More
Has anyone else tried purchasing tickets for the midnight showing? I just tried and Fandango is a dirty, filthy liar. The midnight showing at the IMAX here in NYC was lit up all red like tickets were available, but it really wasn’t. I want to cry now. You suck, Fandango. → Read More
The indignity of it all. On top of everything else that Yahoo is dealing with right now (testy shareholders, departing executives, reorganized employees), it also just got dumped by Maxim. The magazine’s site, Maxim.com, now uses Quintura to power its search instead of Yahoo. Its sister sites Blender.com and Stuffmagazine.com, will also soon be dumping Yahoo as well. All three sites are operated by Maxim Digital, which is owned by the private equity firm Quadrangle Capital Partners, where former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig happens to be an operating principal. Quintura’s search interface creates a semantic tag cloud above the results. By clicking on different tags, users can refine their search and reorder the results. I’m a big fan of the search tag cloud. But I’m not sure the final results are any better than Yahoo’s, and they certainly take longer to come up. The appeal to publishers like Maxim Digital, though, is that they can keep searchers on their sites longer by helping visitors find exactly what they are looking for—which in the case of Maxim readers is “hot girls” and “stupid fun.” → Read More
There has been much talk of Twitter users moving over to FriendFeed since Twitter replies were down for the majority of last week. Twitter announced that they were back on Saturday in their blog, but seeing as the outage may have inspired some users to flock to FriendFeed, I decided to take a look at the 3rd-party applications and scripts that enhance the FriendFeed functionality. For those of you moving on to FriendFeed’s greener pastures, here are 13 essential tools for an organized, “noise”-free experience. Gridjit is a new web application, that is currently in private alpha, that organizes your FriendFeed and Twitter timelines into columns. It spreads out your timeline by user and shows that user’s most recent posts in boxes that are distributed across three columns. You can also post to Twitter and FriendFeed from the site. It’s a very new service, so there may be bugs, but if you’d like to try it out, Gridjit has supplied us with 250 invites. Enter the code dde60be to try it out. Alert Thingy enables you to see your FriendFeed timeline from your desktop and receive updates through notifications (covered here). You can post updates and comment from the application, as well as post to Twitter or Flickr. Alert Thingy runs on Adobe AIR. Twhirl, a popular desktop application among Twitterers, allows for FriendFeed posting and has a timeline tracker. It also supports posting to Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku, and allows for filtering news by “rooms”. Since Twhirl is a widely-used Twitter client, this should allow for an easier FriendFeed transition. Twhirl runs on Adobe AIR so it is available for Windows and OSX. bTT by Sobees is a desktop FriendFeed application that is part of Sobees’ desktop suite bSuite. It is currently available for download independently of bSuite. bTT allows FriendFeed updates, comments, comment replies, and likes. It is currently available for Windows. MySocial 24×7 is a Firefox plugin that allows you to access your FriendFeed timeline from your sidebar (covered here). You can filter your timeline by friend, or by feed source (Youtube, Amazon, RSS). MySocial 24×7 has also released an Adobe AIR desktop application (covered here). The desktop application provides the same functionality of the Firefox sidebar in an attractive desktop application. NoiseRiver is a new web application launched yesterday, from FeedEgo, that uses FriendFeed’s API to filter out some of the noise. You can login through → Read More
