http://www.prnewswire.com/mnr/mnr_lib/200808/players/player-single.swf?job=34799Get right the hell outta town with this thing. Here’s a blender – a blender – using wireless power. It’s the result of “eCoupled intelligent wireless power” which has been created by Fulton Innovation. The company is working on building the same magical power system into other “high-powered kitchen devices like blenders, grills, and coffee makers.” No word on when we’ll actually see these things in our own kitchens or how much it’s gonna cost at first. All I know is that I want it. → Read More
By this point, most Americans have made up their minds about who they are going to vote for President come Election Day. But if you are still trying to decide, or just want to reassure yourself that you are indeed voting for the candidate who most closely reflects your views, take the Glassbooth Quiz. The site is run by a non-partisan, non-profit organization (or so it claims). You tell the site what your positions are on a range of issues, and it spits back compatibility scores for each of the Presidential candidates (including third-party candidates Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, and Bob Barr). You can try it just to make sure you really are on the same page with your preferred candidate. → Read More
This made all of us here smile the other day and if you need a break from all these damn Apple posts, you’ll enjoy it too. → Read More
Love it or hate it, the time before an Apple announcement is a time for rumors. They flutter about the flame of credibility, at the very boundary of reasonable doubt, and then, come the event, are cruelly incinerated by the harsh heat of truth. Actually, it’s not nearly so picturesque; it’s more like “people want pageviews so they propagate the most fanciful BS ever to hit the tip line.” So in the wake of Apple’s eventful announcement today, let’s see what was floating around in past weeks that did not come to pass. → Read More
When asked today about the possibility of an Apple netbook, Steve Jobs said something to the effect of, “The market is just getting started – we’ll see how it goes.” Huh? Here’s how the netbook market’s going, Steve: pretty much every major computer company has a netbook but you. Apple’s a prime candidate for a netbook, too. Know why? Because it’s just about the only company that could get away with selling it for well over $500. I bet Apple could sell a netbook for at least $600 or more. → Read More
For some odd reason, the Apple Store is down [again] after showing the new products for about an hour post today’s keynote. No word on why, but you can assume that there was a mistake somewhere in there. Just wish we would have caught the culprit before it went down. → Read More
Even new notebooks couldn’t break the grip of a sinking market as the red line represents the Dow Jones vs Apple’s blue line. It seems that the pre-show trades showed confidence in Apple, but as the keynote progress, the Dow fell, dragging Apple with kick and throwing aluminum with it. → Read More
This week’s activity in the tech sector seems guided by the rest of the economy, as the world holds its collective breath while waiting for the other, or any, shoe to drop. The presidential race seems to have stabilized with a significant if not conclusive lead for Obama. Apple announced refreshes of its laptop line, Microsoft sold off its Silverlight 2.0 news in advance of the PDC, and pictures and videos of the Gphone surfaced. The Silverlight press conference produced a few interesting factoids, including the news that Silverlight penetration has reached 1 in 4 households after the launch at the Olympics and subsequent coverage of the Democratic National Convention. I asked Scott Guthrie how Chrome, Android, and iPhone support was coming, and got back: progress, optimism, and fuggetaboutit. Some subtle hints about data caching capabilities, forthcoming application announcements, and Silverlight code serving dual purpose within both browser and desktop code suggest Guthrie’s role within the company is continuing to expand. Apple’s conservative approach to the so-called Netbook segment comes as no surprise. Each new announcement seems to roll up the last’s technological progress, which today centered on the MacBook Air’s build process being ported up and down the MacBook line. More forward-looking was the continued integration of Tim Cook and other executives into the presentation, with Cook in an increasingly active posture including some of the Jobsian humor long reserved for the boss. The net effect was of orderly consolidation of Apple’s transformation into the dominant architecture of the mobile Net. The thread that ties so much of what’s visible of the tech iceberg together is the success, or difficulty, of managing the flow from old to new guard in the Cloud era. Age is really not a factor, as Jobs is signaling by changing Apple’s rhythm from Big Bang to continuous partial innovation. Microsoft is struggling not with the technology so much as the challenges of messaging, essaying the transition from structured to unstructured media so personified by the Twitter phenomenon. And then there’s Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz, who broke a several-year moratorium on conversations with me with an intriguing new open source announcement. Whatever you think of the business model, certainly Schwartz continues to be a trailblazer in the leveraging of social media fundamentals. → Read More
The MacBook Air, being a newer design than the aging MacBooks and Pros, got little more than a bump in specs today. But it was a good, solid bump! Here are the changes: SSD drive increased in capacity to 128GB Processor now up to 1.86GHz with a faster (1066MHz) FSB and 6MB L2 cache GeForce 9400M 256MB video card (thank god for that) Mini Displayport instead of Micro-DVI (probably a smart move) Very nice. I think people buying the Air are probably pretty Apple-committed, so the new display connector will be just dandy for them. It’s still short on ports, but you knew that. You’ll be able to get them in November. → Read More
Here is the skinny – the new MacBooks have dropped and while the $899 option is missing, they still rock anyway. An Intel Core 2 Duo is still at the core, but just like its new big MBP brother, NVIDIA is powering the graphics with an 9400M GPU and sports the new two-tone style. → Read More
Very funny. Unless it’s just an act and, like Kim Jong Il, the original Steve died years ago and this one is just a Life Model Decoy. With Apple’s new manufacturing techniques, they could probably pull it off… → Read More
A few months ago iPhone application developer Tapulous announced FriendBook, an app that would allow users to hold shake their phones together to exchange contact information – a fun and simple alternative to pocketfuls of clumsy business cards. Unfortunately, FriendBook still remains unreleased after a wave of shakeups over at Tapulous, and while we’ve seen a few alternatives like rmbrME, none of them have the simplicity of a proximity-based, wireless transfer.
Thankfully developer Meganova BV has created an application called Nameo that manages to replicate much of the functionality promised by FriendBook. The app was released on the App Store last night and is available for $2.99 here. → Read More
Yahoo wants to change your mind about its search engine. It wants you to know that it is better at helping you find things thanks to features like its SearchAssist auto-complete keywords (which has been around for a year), safe searching filters, and Search Monkey add-ons. So it is launching a campaign with display ads like the one on the left for the Web and radio spots as well trying to paint Google’s search engine as an inferior product—a place where people go to get lost.
Of course, Yahoo’s market share numbers tell a different story. In the U.S., it’s share of query volume as measured by comScore declined about a point in August to 19.6 percent, while Google’s rose a point to 63 percent. And if you look at traffic to each search engine, In the U.S., Yahoo has been flat for a year (up 0.8 percent) with 76.1 million unique visitors in August, while Google is up 16.9 percent to 127.9 million uniques. (These numbers are just for their respective search engines). Worldwide, the gap is even bigger, with Google attracting a whopping 636 million unique visitors in August (up 31.7 percent), versus Yahoo’s 231 million (down 3.4 percent). → Read More
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