When we first came across Microsoft Songsmith, it was the promo video that made us cringe. But the song-making software is inspiring a whole new genre on YouTube where people alter famous music videos and concert footage by stripping out the original instruments and replace them with tinny keyboards or folk banjos, and keep the vocals. The results are a twisted breed of classic hits that are fascinating in the same way that terrible automobile accidents are. Once you start watching, it is hard to look away.
These songs as sung through Songsmith have become a popular meme. Music from the Beatles to “Nirvana to Radiohead have all gotten the Songsmith treatment. There is even a heavy metal version of the Rickroll. Youtube member azz100c, who also appears to be the author of the Journeys of Jack Tripper blog, is particularly obsessed (and adept) at making these Songsmith classics.
Below I present some of the best of the worst. → Read More
The Superbowl is in 17 hours, but many people think they already know who will win. The odds on betting site Betfair give the the Pittsburgh Steelers a 69 percent chance of winning versus the Arizona Cardinals. Both were seen as long shots at the beginning of the season, when the Steelers were given a 4 percent chance of winning the Super Bowl, and the Cardinals were only given a 1 percent chance. (See chart).
Betting markets like Betfair’s are a form of prediction market, so it looks like it is the Steeler’s game to lose. Then again, what do Brits know about American football? U.S. residents cannot legally bet on Betfair, which is based in London. → Read More
Windows 7 has proven to be an excellent scaler, as it seems to run excellently not just on top-end hardware but on hardware so outdated as to be laughable. This U560 UMPC, which I’m sure is an excellent little machine for playing King’s Quest IV on, actually worked quite well with 7 despite only sporting a 600MHz Atom A100 processor. I’m beginning if I’ll be able to run 7 on my GP2X or Pandora!
Hit the link for video. → Read More
That took surprisingly long! I would have expected a game like this (tasteless certainly, but not necessarily distasteful) to have occurred mere hours after the crash. If you can believe it, it took almost a week for a developer to put together a couple sprites, a smoke effect, and the gameplay from Top Gun on NES. → Read More
Hey, hyper-intelligent man-boys! Want to create an early form of artificial intelligence using colored blocks? Watch the video and learn the majesty of Turing Machines and thrill to the strains of the A-Team theme. This is a perfect storm for social bookmarking.
Here’s a question for you. How many Q&A sites does the Web really need? Already, there is Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers, Mahalo Answers, Linkedin Answers, ChaCha and dozens beyond. But Wikia (and Wikipedia) co-founder Jimmy Wales thinks there is room for one more.
We learned from a tip that he has quietly launched Wikianswers, a Question & Answer site that attempts to create one true, consensus answer for each question, wiki-style. If this sounds familiar it is because Wiki Answers, which is part of Answers.com, does the exact same thing and had 26.7 million unique visitors worldwide in December (comScore). (Yahoo Answers had 144.7 million worldwide uniques in December).
And then there is the little problem of the name. It is supposed to be Wikia Answers!, but in the current logo the last “a” of Wikia shares the first “a” of Answers, making it Wikianswers. The already established WikiAnswers might have a problem with that. (The URLs are different: http://answers.wikia.com and http://wiki.answers.com/, respectively)
Update: Wikia Gil Penchina responds in comments:
Wikianswers started at Wikia in November, 2004. The other site with the same name was called FAQFarm back then and changed their name without getting our permission.
The poor bastard who got a tattoo of the motivational “Blue Monster” has been laid off. Blue Monster Man, Dan Woodman, writes:
Working at Microsoft has been the greatest experience of my life and I have no desire to forget about it. And even if I don’t get back into Microsoft right away (which is, by the way, my plan!), then I have a reminder that even outside of Microsoft, I need to do my best to change the world every single day.
VentureBeat has a hot, hot scoop on Intel planning Android notebooks. Could they know something we don’t, namely that Intel, a stalwart chip manufacturer, might have gone crazy and started designing and selling netbooks? → Read More
The economic crisis and resultant drop in spending has slowed down a lot of tech industries. Even the big players like Intel, NEC, and IBM are taking major hits, part of which is due to, well, people not buying their products. Intel in particular has delayed some rollouts due to a warehouses of Core2 processors and motherboards they expected to have sold by now.
One such casualty is their GPU/CPU combo, which was probably to be launched later this year.
But there’s good news! → Read More
You’re at the in-laws or a sig. other’s friend’s house. Someone mentions that their computer is broken. You’re tired of the conversation. Do you bail and reinstall Vista for them? → Read More
Last year I blogged about the YouTube corner at the World Economic Forum event in Davos, Switzerland. They had prime real estate between the main conference area and private meeting rooms, and heads of state, business executives, Nobel Laureates and rock stars strolled by and stopped to leave a video.
YouTube was back this year with an even better setup. In addition to computers where people could create YouTube videos answering various questions (Kofi Annan is pictured to left), the Google team brought in a touch screen version of Google Earth, complete with World Economic Forum data layered on top. Google earth was projected onto a wall, and people could zoom around the earth and view interesting data like historic and projected climate changes.
Ed Sanders (YouTube Marketing Manager) and Amit Sood (Google International Product Marketing Manager) walked me through both the YouTube and Google Earth products. Video is below: → Read More
Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism unveiled a new index yesterday that traces blogs and social networking sites. To be honest, it doesn’t say a whole lot that we don’t already know.
The New Media Index’s first report states “From the preparations to the swearing-in to the music, President Barack Obama’s inauguration was by far and away the dominant subject debated and dissected by bloggers, user news sites and other social media last week.” The index reported that close to 63 percent of links embedded in social media sites related to the inauguration. Big surprise. The report also said that commentary was very passionate and ran the “ideological gamut.” Also, not earth-shattering news and confirms what everyone already knows-people tend to be more politically feisty on blogs and social media sites. → Read More
Apple has informed retail partners that iMac availability is going to be strained in the coming weeks which might mean the company is slowing down production of the current lineup ahead of announcing new models. The iMacs are anything but outdated, but the model line definitely isn’t cutting edge either. Intel’s low power, quad-core CPUs should replace the Core 2 Duo processor along with an NVIDIA GPU architecture that the company seems infatuated with lately. A Blu-ray drive would be nice too, but that likely will not happen due to Apple’s stance on physical media in general. → Read More
Don’t call it a case. That word implies durable protection, which this Gilty Couture product is not. A $125 buys you a gold-plated bezel that’s sure to invoke more unneeded iPhone safety paranoia. Now, not only do you have to anally obsess ‘bout the phone’s glossy plastic back and the delicate touchscreen, but now this damn bezel. Is that how you wanna live? Really? → Read More
Silicon Alley Insider has found that printing the New York Times costs twice as much as if the company gave every subscriber an Amazon Kindle using some rough numbers and elementary math. Obviously, not everyone likes the Kindle and cutting out the distribution of the NYT would eliminate thousands of jobs, but it clearly shows how digital is killing the print star. The transition to a digital print medium will not be complete until the next generation though as many baby boomers – and their parents – have trouble with GPSs and cell phones. So no matter how much it costs to keep killing trees, the practice will continue for their sake alone. → Read More
We’re not quite sure what’s going on, but a couple of minutes ago any search result from Google started being flagged as malware with a message stating “This site may harm your computer”.
Twitter is abuzz with people reporting the massive error (also look for tags #googmayharm or #googmayhem), and it’s clear that this is happening around the world. Apparently, it’s happening with any browser on any platform too.
Clicking the message takes people to a support page from Google, but this is being bombarded with millions of people right now so it’s very slow to respond. I saw the page briefly, and it pointed to StopBadware.org (which is obviously also loading slowly right now).
Update: it seems to be fixing itself. I’m having no more issues on Google Belgium, still getting warning messages for malicious software when I search Google.com. Also, it only seems to occur when you’re searching as a signed-in user now.
Update 2: it seems to be fine now. Lasted about 15 minutes (Google says the window was more like 55 minutes). You can take a deep breath now and go on with whatever you were doing before
Now we just have to wait for Google to tell us what went wrong. It’s quite clear that a meltdown of this size, no matter how short it was, will be the topic of discussion for the coming days (and not only at the Googleplex, I’d wager).
Update 3: Marissa Mayer has now explained the error on the Official Google Blog. She puts it down to human error after a ‘/’ was mistakenly put in an update sent from the non-profit StopBadware.org to Google (the non-profit also posted more details). The result was every URL in Google’s database being classified as “malware” until the stray ‘/’ was removed. → Read More
I sat down with MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland for a few minutes between sessions he was participating in. Travis Katz, GM of MySpace International, was also supposed to attend but was off skiing for the day.
DeWolfe talks about the two star hotel he’s staying at here in Davos (complete with a Murphy Bed), and compares the more somber mood of the event to the last time he attended two years ago.
Regarding MySpace, DeWolfe says he’s “cautiously optimistic” about revenue for the fiscal year and notes that five-year old MySpace has had faster revenue growth than almost any other Internet company.
The full video after the jump: → Read More
This happened last Tuesday, but we wanted to make sure you’re aware that Nielsen management, after years of research, has finally come up with an adequate solution to cluttered e-mail inboxes and inefficiency in office environments: control-deleting the reply-to-all button from the messaging software.
In a move that could have come straight from Mike Judge’s Office Space, the company has decided to remove the button from their e-mail program of choice, Microsoft Outlook, affecting all 35,000 employees across the globe. In a memo, republished by Folio, Andrew Cawood, Chief Information Officer for Nielsen Company, writes that the measure will “eliminate bureaucracy and inefficiency”.
I’ve never been a huge fan of the reply-to-all button either, but removing it sure sounds like a very extreme decision, and claiming that it will eliminate bureaucracy and inefficiency is just plain absurd.
Memo after the jump. → Read More
