The Nokia E66 will be hitting the U.S. in the third quarter with an unsubsidized price of $500. While that price may sound like it’s a bit (or a lot) on the high side, the phone actually has a fair number of tricks up its sleeve and will likely appeal mostly to corporate users who may never see the price tag to begin with. Lest you think this device is all business, there’s a unique (and perhaps a bit gimmicky) “switch mode” that allows you to basically keep all of your work-related stuff in one profile on the phone throughout the day and then switch to a more lifestyle-centric profile at night, complete with a darker theme, friendlier icons, and that kind of stuff. Picture an employee for a large company getting in the elevator at the end of the day, loosening the tie and switching phone modes before getting into a cab to go wait in line for some new overpriced, dark, loud, small-portions restaurant. → Read More
A Nanorobotics professor at Carnegie Mellon has created a little pill-sized robot that he says can travel safely through the gut and snap good pictures along the way. The problem in the past has been that the adhesive required to stick a camera to an intestinal wall (or whatever) has been permanent. Meaning you’d have to rip out a piece if you wanted to remove the camera. So if you need extended observation of, say, a polyp up there, you had to agree to either supergluing something to your intestines or having a camera on a wire snaking its way through you. Not the easiest choice. So this new adhesive can be easily detached from tissue, and so the bot’s position can be controlled by extending or retracting its sticky little arms. Good news for anyone with tract issues. The researcher, Martin Sitti, says he was inspired by gecko feet; that’s a nice thought, a robot gecko climbing through your innermost tubes. → Read More
Just a few months after the N95′s first birthday, Nokia’s prepping to launch it’s big bad brother, the N96. According to rumors floating around the intertubes, this little puppy might be in the hands of Nokia fans as early as October 1st – at least, in the UK. No word yet on US pricing or availability, though past reports have pinned it around $800-$1000 US ducats. Chances are, it won’t be in the bought-on-a-whim price range. If you like the N95, you’ll want to snuggle up next to the N96 and never let go. They’ve doubled the storage space from 8 GB to 16, upped the screen size, doubled the camera flash, improved audio playback, added support for WMV9 and H.264 playback, and made a ton of design improvements (like the built-in kickstand). I’m definitely looking forward to playing with this one. [Via BGR] → Read More
This UnMouse pad being shown at the Microsoft Research Summit looks pretty freaking awesome. It’s a super-thin, pressure-sensitive little pad that can take just about as many inputs as you care to give it — and each input contains analog pressure info. Microsoft is working with NYU to put it out there; it’s apparently cheap to make and is almost certainly able to be made in many sizes. Trouble is it probably can’t be transparent, so it can’t be used in touchscreens. But something like this could be great for putting in cheaper devices that can’t include tech like that. I’m thinking tiny laptops! → Read More
Music and movies may grab the most headlines when it comes to piracy, but many content providers on the web are also having trouble managing their images, which are easy to crop, resize, and copy. Some services, like Attributor, try to monitor and track offending images, but the ultimate solution may well lie in removing the temptation in the first place by offering cheap and easy to find legal images. Earlier this year, GumGum launched an image licensing platform that was designed to help publishers quickly locate and license images. The site served as a content hub, offering a searchable database of images that could be licensed on a CPM basis or for free alongside an ad. Unfortunately, every one of GumGum’s images was served as an embeddable Flash widget, which made them both clunky and annoying for publishers, as the images couldn’t be resized or modified. The use of Flash allowed GumGum to include their ads with the images, and also made it harder for people to rip them off (though you could always just take a screenshot). PicApp, a similar image search and licensing platform, uses Flash as well and suffers from the same issues. Today GumGum has announced a new approach to their licensing platform, and this time, there won’t be any Flash involved. To use the system, users need only include a single line of JavaScript on their page. From there, they can include any image they want using a standard HTML tag. The pricing models will be the same: publishers can either pay a fee based on image impressions, or they can include ads on top of their images. GumGum’s new platform can detect licensed images and overlays the ad on top of it, so there’s no need to use a special widget. Another key shift in GumGum’s new approach is its decision to stop acting as an image hub – you’ll no longer be able to search through content catalogs to find an image. Instead, GumGum says that it will connect you directly with the content providers, who typically offer their own databases. By taking this approach, GumGum is turning away from the typical consumer and is becoming more of a B2B solution for blogs and sites that frequently rely on licensed images. GumGum isn’t going to be able to stop image piracy – there’s simply no way to get around the “Print Screen” → Read More
Oh, Yahoo. Why do you make it so hard to like you? Take this story. Yahoo is shutting down its music download store at the end of September, including the DRM validation servers. Without DRM validation servers, people who purchased tracks outright won’t be able to play them. In other words, people will be left with useless files on their hard drives. Nice. To be fair, it’s not like Yahoo is completely screwing its [former] customers. The company will provide coupons to download the previously downloaded (but now useless) songs again from Rhapsody, which will be DRM-free MP3s. That, or you can get your money back. Your choice. Meh, to be honest, Yahoo is doing right by it customers, and this is more of an illustatrion of how silly DRM is more than anything else. → Read More
One month after launching its new recommendation system, Digg is already reporting positive results. Digg recommends stories based on other members with similar voting patterns and interests. Chief scientist Anton Kast writes on the Digg Blog: – Digging activity is up significantly: the total number of Diggs increased 40% after launch. – The Recommendation Engine is running strong: at any given point in time, the system is generating over 54 Million Recommendations, with the average Digger having nearly 200 Recommendations from an average of 34 “Diggers like you”. – Friend activity/friends added is up 24%. – Commenting is up 11% since launch. Digg’s recommendation engine takes a Last.fm approach to finding people’s whose tastes overlap with yours and then suggesting stories they’ve Dugg up but that you’ve missed. It is collaborative filtering for news. As Digg becomes more mainstream, it needs technologies such as this to bring it back to its glory days when everybody was interested in the same niche categories. Social recommendations work best when they are extracted from niche communities who are obsessive about one or two topics. Digg started out as a haven for hardcore techies, but has branched out. The recommendation system is designed to, in effect, help Diggers carve out their own niche communities again. If you happen to like tech industry news, you will see stories from other like-minded Diggers. If you prefer politics or sports, you’ll get those stories. And if you like a combination, the system will grab recommendations from each appropriate bucket. At least, that is how it is supposed to work in theory. The recommendations seem decent. But I personally haven’t noticed anything that really strikes home. Over time, it should get better. CrunchBase Information Digg Anton Kast Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Amazon is letting loose the 60GB Xbox 360 today for the low, low price of $349.99. Just thought you might want to know. That is all. → Read More
Oh background push, how I yearn for you. You bring tidings of fun and communication, whether the application is in the foreground or not. Imagine: the ability to receive instant message notifications, even when the application is off screen. This is the future, people. Our jet packs arrive next week. As of last night, select developers have begun receiving the tools required to create constantly-aware applications. By tying the applications to Apple’s Push Notification Service server via a persistent connection, applications can continue to receive notifications even when they’re pretty much closed. As the tools aren’t actually tied to a live server yet, it may still be a while before background-enabled applications hit the App Store. Progress is progress, though, and Apple still has plenty of time before their self-set deadline in 2 months. → Read More
Embedable stock charts are nothing new, and neither are interactive charts that give you price information as you mouse over different dates. Both Yahoo Finance and Google Finance offer interactive charts on their respective sites, and Yahoo offers embeddable static charts. Neither one brings that interactivity to chart widgets that can be embedded on other sites. But starting today you can get interactive, embeddable WikiCharts like the one below from Wikinvest. Hold the mouse down over the chart and you can pan it from left to right. Hover over the line and you will get date, price, and volume, information. And it’s a wiki, so anyone can add an annotation. Do you think you know what’s been driving Yahoo’s stock price up and down lately? Stick in your best explanation before or during big price movements as an annotation. http://charts.wikinvest.com/WikiChartMini.swf/WikiChartMini.swf CrunchBase Information Wikinvest Information provided by CrunchBase . → Read More
Can you tell it’s summertime yet? This delightful little concept that’ll never actually be manufactured, called Sweet Honey, combines aroma therapy with lossy MP3s, which just has to be a match made in Heaven. The little bulb thing on the other end of the headphone wire contains a scented tablet. Depending on the type of music being played, different scents are released. Fact: when you play emo, the stench of failure emanates from the device. → Read More
Secure in knowing that he will get minority seats on Yahoo’s board, Carl Icahn has decided to skip tomorrow’s shareholder meeting. He doesn’t want to cause a “media event,” he says. (Because he’s so shy, you know). Seriously, it’s probably a good idea for him not to show up. On his blog he explains his reasons, and his thinking on why he settled for a compromise deal with Yahoo instead of going ahead with a full proxy battle: Realizing I could not gain control, I saw no point in spending the final two weeks in a debilitating fight, where little would be accomplished except to build animosity between both camps and the end result would be no better than the compromise that was reached. In fact, in winning a minority position on a board by a fight to the end, you always have to be concerned that you may be “boxed” out by the majority that remains on the board. Committees can be formed that you are excluded from and you are given information only on a need to know basis. An important part of my compromise with Yahoo is that the board in the settlement agreement has agreed “that any meaningful transaction, including the strategy in dealing with that transaction, will be fully discussed with the entire board before any final decision is made.” Additionally, if any committee is formed to negotiate a meaningful transaction, Carl Icahn will be a member of that committee. In other words, it might become a media and shareholder circus tomorrow. But don’t look for anything “meaningful” to happen until afterwards, when the new board is in place. → Read More
My biggest gripe with the iPhone thus far has been the inability to run apps in the background. It’s something I’ve become accustomed to after having been a loyal Sidekick user and now BlackBerry user. Sure, Apple’s argument against it makes perfect sense, but it’s a necessity for power users like you and me. It was revealed at WWDC that Apple would soon push out a service that allows for applications to run in the background, but in a different manner than what we’re used to with other smart phones. The Push Notification Service doesn’t run in the same manner as Windows Mobile task manager, though. The PNS connects to a server that watches the threads through a persistent IP connection that would push out notifications, so you can close out AIM, for instance, and go about your business until someone IMs you. Of course, you know all about this having paid close attention to our live WWDC coverage. The new news here is that the API has been doled out to a handful of developers and will surely be pushed out when iPhone OS 2.1 rolls out. → Read More
Sony’s virtual world, Playstation Home, has been delayed multiple times since it was first announced in July of 2007. But an outreach for beta testers in Japan should give Sony PS3 owners a glimmer of hope here in the US. It’s unclear why the beta testing is being limited to Japan, but hopefuls can apply starting today until August 11. Sony plans to offer 10,000 gamers access to the virtual world in the latter half of August. An open beta test is expected to roll out later this year for other markets. Beta testers will be privy to a suite of Bandai Namco games that include Pac Man. We’ll see if this actually happens. There has to be something wrong for Sony to have suspended the testing for over a year, right? → Read More
When Google announced that they’d added transit information to the Google Maps for Blackberry application, I was beyond pumped. A lingering artifact of a time when pen-and-paper was the only option, transit maps make me angry. Now Google’s gone and freed S60 and Windows Mobile users from ever having to deal with transit maps either. With the release of version 2.2, both platforms can route directions through the public transportation systems of over 50 cities. The update also packs in 2 extra features: star-ratings for business can provide a rough estimate of public opinion, while user-generated content on the maps.. uh.. keeps things interesting? I’ve never actually found a use for the user-generated stuff – more often than not, it’s just in my way. To grab the latest version of Google Maps for Mobile, point your handset at google.com/gmm → Read More
