We’re closing in on PMA 2009, so finalized spec sheets for as-yet-unreleased cameras may be being released into the wild. Expect more rumors over the next month; today, it’s Sony’s A800, the logical successor to the A700, a solid upper-entry-level DSLR with a few polish issues.
The list of supposed improvements varies, here’s what we think you can count on. → Read More
IT Hit just launched the Beta version of their web-based file manager. Certainly the ability to create, edit, and save Microsoft Office Documents on the server–without downloading the file or any plugins–is the most immediately useful feature. Unfortuntely, the Microsoft Office integration requires Internet Explorer; however, I successfully used the IE-Tab Firefox extension to edit a Powerpoint deck within Firefox. Try it yourself at the demo site–no registration required. On the backend, the file manager uses the WebDAV XML protocol to exchange data with the server. It will run on any WebDAV-compliant server based on .NET Framework, Java, PHP, or any other programming language. Because the file manager was built entirely in Javascript, it works across the four major browsers–Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari–in any OS, without requiring additional third-party software. The pricing varies depending on your needs, and I found it a little complicated to interpret–but don’t expect to get started for less than $1250. Update: IT HIT e-mailed me to clarify pricing. Our main target audience are the developers of DMS/CMS/CRM systems that require standards-compliant communication with a server for file management. For such customers we provide a Redistribution License: $2250. Usually this license is for customers that want to redistribute IT Hit AJAX File Browser as part of their product. Users that want to install AJAX File Browser on a single website (single domain name) can purchase Single Server / FQDN license: $1250 Often our customers require both client and server WebDAV library, so we also provide packages with significant discount: IT Hit WebDAV Server Engine for .Net Redistribution License + IT Hit AJAX File Browser Redistribution License: $3350 IT Hit WebDAV Server Engine for .Net Single Server License + IT Hit AJAX File Browser Single Server / FQDN license: $1950 More info on the AJAX File Browser Homepage. CrunchBase Information IT HIT AJAX File Browser Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
That’s dedication for you. StarCraft 1.16.1 adds a CPU throttling option and fixes a couple issues. I think it’s incredible that even in the run-up to the Starcraft 2 trilogy, they’ve still got people hammering on decade-old code. Of course, it helps that about one trillion people play the game every day, most of them in Korea. → Read More
In November 2008 Facebook drew 200 million unique worldwide visitors; more than 1 in 5 people who accessed the Internet that month visited the site. When sites are that big growth generally stagnates, but in Facebook’s case it’s still skyrocketing. In December, 222 million people visited the site says newly released Comscore stats, a 10.8% month over month growth rate. 22% of the total Internet audience went to Facebook in December.
Facebook now has nearly 100 million more worldwide users than MySpace, which added 4 million new users in December to 125 million total. The page view difference is more dramatic – Facebook had 80 billion monthly page views in December v. 43 billion for MySpace. Just six months ago the sites were about the same size.
Facebook, still a private company, is the world’s default social network. MySpace is still the king in the U.S., but trends suggest that 2009 is its last year on top. By January 2010, at current relative growth rates, Facebook will overtake MySpace as the largest U.S. social network as well. → Read More
Starting a new job is always a challenge. You have to learn where your office is, where the coffee machine is, and the best route from each to the bathroom. Now imagine how complicated it must be when an entirely new administration starts working in the White House! In addition to the normal challenges, President Obama and his staff suffered through a number of surprising headaches. → Read More
I won’t bore you with financial details because we’ve been doing enough of that in the last couple days so I’ll get straight to the point. Ubisoft will be launching seven franchise titles this year (or there fiscal year which runs from April of ’09 to March ’10), three new brands and four movie license-based games across all platforms. Unfortunately, I Am Alive won’t be making it out this ‘year’ because it needs further development time. It will launch in the ’09 fiscal year, though. The fourth quarter for 08-09 will see the launch for Tom Clancy’s Hawx for Xbox 360, PC and PS3 with EndWar coming to the PC as well. A whole gaggle of games for Nintendo will also launch this quarter but nothing worth mentioning unless you’re into Grey’s Anatomy. → Read More
No need to get those overpriced Monster Cable HDMI doodads when the cheap ones are just as good! → Read More
UK mobile RSS reader Mippin is upgrading its service to cater for the iPhone and the Android G1 after witnessing a marked increase in use of the service by these handsets. The question is, will we notice? Mippin says the average user duration is just over 5 minutes but on the iPhone and G1 it is 7+ mins. The user churn on G1 and iPhone is minimal (of 100 users who visit on those devices virtually all are still using the service 2 months later). Plus Mippin has launched an Android application which has had 20,000 downloads thus far. None of this is that surprising. Everyone knows the mobile web rocks on these devices compared to any other handset. This is not really big news. And the trouble is, Mippin’s business model – monetising RSS feeds tailored specifically for mobile by sharing revenue with publishers – could have a real up-hill battle getting anywhere. It also seems odd, that after getting their actual VC on board as CEO to steer the company, that they are reduced to making a big song and dance about tweaking the interface for the iPhone. I mean, shouldn’t that have happened a while back? Granted, Mippin is gunning to be the application whcih takes the process of reading RSS feeds on your mobile into the mainstream. If there is one startup out there that could do it, Mippin is probably it. However, one really does wonder if this will happen. iPhone applications appear to be the way forward for many publishers. Plus personally I find the Google Reader on the iPhone to be amazing. I just don’t use Mippin. Does anyone else? Feel free to comment below. Of course, I may be completely and utterly wrong. Quantcast and Compete both shore Mippins traffic heading in the right direction. This is US traffic, so the uptake there may well be greater than we think, back here in the UK. In which case Mippin should be talking about traffic, not interface tweaks. CrunchBase Information RefreshMobile Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Go ahead and visit FinalFantasy13.com right now. A five-day countdown will greet you, promising a “new vision,” which several folks have interpreted to mean a new trailer. (“New vision = new trailer.”) There’s even some good old fashioned evidence to support this assumption. → Read More
Don’t scoff at this, friend. There are still millions of citizens of this great nation who have not and will not switch to Blu-ray or HD DVD (it’s still around if you look hard enough). Therefore, I offer Amazon’s lightning deal for the next couple hours. I’d be quick about it, though. → Read More
Google just released fourth quarter earnings. Net Income was down a whopping 68 percent to $382 million (compared to $1.2 billion a year ago), primarily because of a $1 billion impairment charge related Google’s ownership stakes in AOL (for which it took a $726 million writedown) and Clearwire ($355 million writedown). We all know why the AOL stake is worth less than what Google paid for it (just look at Time Warner’s stock.) Instead of the $20 billion that Google’s five percent stake valued AOL at teh time of its original investment, its new writedown now values AOL at $5.5 billion.
The Clearwire writedown isn’t surprising either. That is the Wimax company that had disaster written all over it. → Read More
We’ve seen (and written) our fair share of advice concerning the Circuit City liquidation, but now it’s time to hear from an actual Circuit City employee about what’s really going on. → Read More
Take your standard issue iPhone, throw in tagged audio recordings uploaded to a web-based audio rendering platform, add a dash of geolocation data slipped into Google Maps – et voila! You have AudioBoo, an application that lets you record, slice, dice and track audio uploads by location or tag from your mobile. In plain English, that would translate into a map of the world tagged with evocative sounds of each place. Sound cool? UK broadcaster Channel 4 thinks so – its innovation fund 4iP has bankrolled AudioBoo’s next stage of development for an undisclosed amount. Channel 4′s new media guru John Gisby will be demoing the app at the Oxford Media Convention today, where he’ll announce the beta release. Developer Best Before Media has 97 tokens left available for would-be beta testers, though a few are already taken – Stephen Fry is one of the early adopters. An ad-sponsored model of AudioBoo will be free to consumers, with a premium service offered to corporate users, such as tourist authorities, businesses, museums or news organisations. Here’s a taste of what’s to come (updated video): Hello AudioBoo from Mark Rock on Vimeo. Best Before has submitted AudioBoo to the App Store, and hopes to launch it officially at SXSW Interactive in March, which it is attending as part of the Digital Mission organised by Chinwag for UK Trade & Investment. AudioBoo is the brainchild of Best Before Media, a London-based company that makes software-based audio and video toolsets for the next generation of broadcasting. You may have heard of them in the context of Millicent, their web-enabled framework that is an attempt to be to broadcasting what Aldus Pagemaker and Quark Xpress was to newspaper publishing. In fact, the company has developed a host of disruptive technology over the last two years, built on the fundamental principle of a simplistic approach that makes doing fairly technical things easier, cheaper and a whole lot less fiddly. Case in point: Millicent does all the rendering in the cloud and outputs to any resolution, including HD, and in a choice of formats, including any Quicktime format, AVI, Flash, Silverlight, and digital TV compression formats such as MPEG2 transport streams or more specialized ones like Microsoft’s IPTV platform. It can also pull in dynamic data via XML and render it to video in realtime in a visual form entirely different from what it looks like on the web. → Read More
Aren’t you a little tired of seeing nothing but Roombas for sale at woot.com? Sure, the little robots do a great job cleaning up after us filthy humans, but come on! Robots need faces! Why is it that in 2009 our robots have no faces, when twenty years ago you could get a floor-cleaning robot with a face? → Read More
One of our own who has been having trouble killed himself and his wife in an apparent murder-suicide a few weeks ago.
Jason Montes, 33, shot himself and his wife Serena on January 11. Montes worked for Ultra Game Players and the Official Playstation Magazine before going into web consulting. → Read More
Bad news, “Lost” fans. Well, those of you who download 720p caps of the show. It looks like ABC, per juicy message board rumors, is doing something screwy with the video as it airs in order to fit in more commercials—removing frames after the 2:3 pulldown, that is. So, when cappers convert the video into bite-sized x264 chunks for us, it results in jerky playback. (Dupe frames that are present in the original broadcast are removed from the cap.) You’re not going to notice the dropped frames when watching the show on TV (due to the nature of broadcast television), but it makes capping the show a pain in the neck. The resulting cap, less the dupe frames, plays back like garbage. → Read More
So the blogosphere is a buzz because someone found a BRAND NEW Mini series from HP. The fact of the matter is that it’s not an entirely new series. It’s still based on the Mini 1000 series but it now has an ExpressCard slot, which I don’t think is that big of a deal. Everything else is the same based on spec sheets. → Read More
On a day when Microsoft announced 5,000 layoffs, the 7 or so people losing their jobs at Digg may seem like a drop in the bucket. But that represents about about 10 percent of Digg’s 75-person workforce, whereas the 5,000 at Microsoft represents 5 percent. We have added Digg to our Layoff Tracker.
This move follows layoffs last October at sister company Revision3, which was also founded by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson. Adelson writes in a blog post that his goal is to become profitable in 2009, and he is hiring a salesforce to sell ads directly, in addition to trying to make Digg’s advertising partnership with Microsoft more fruitful. The paring back at Digg comes along during a brutal advertising recession, and flattening growth at the site. → Read More
Is $599.95 too much to spend for a hand-painted Chumby? Maybe not if you’re a die-hard fan of artist Sara Antoinette Martin. She painted five (yes, five) Chumby devices by hand, which are now being sold in the Chumby.com store for $599.95 each. → Read More
Microsoft is cutting up to 5,000 jobs in the next 18 months starting with 1,400 today. Cuts will happen in R&D, marketing, sales, finance, legal, HR, and IT – presumably all in back office staff and no cuts in any of the real revenue bringers. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
