After a surprising lack of Android at CES, it looks like everyone’s pulling out their best Android garb for Mobile World Congress next month. Latest on the list of companies purportedly planning an Android announcement is General Mobile who, we’ll admit, we’ve never actually heard of. That’s okay, though – if they actually manage to get the DSTL1 onto the shelves (and if it’s actually running Android – more on that later), this gorgeous little piece might be enough to get their name out there. → Read More
If you’re on your way to an important business meeting, wedding, or award ceremony, the last thing you want to worry about is dribbling chew spittle all over your nicely pressed shirt. But those standard spit cups just can’t be trusted! → Read More
There was a time when 1TB drives seemed huge, but then the 1.25TB and 1.50TB dropped. Now, Western Digital resets the standard at 2TBs with the latest in the Caviar Green lineup. The 3.5-inch drive utilizes 500GB/platter technology along with a 32MB cache for a fast and apparently, eco-friendly operation. The best part? → Read More
I didn’t quite believe it when one of my most trusted sources told me that AOL was seriously considering selling Bebo, the social network it acquired for $850 million only a year ago. But I have now confirmed the rumor with three other sources intimately acquainted with the company. AOL is indeed quietly pondering a sale after watching Bebo perform much worse than it had hoped. That, combined with an advertising market buffeted by the waves of the economic downturn, means Bebo’s days at AOL could be numbered. Selling Bebo after only a year would be an astounding about-face. How did this happen?
[UPDATES: As a result of this story, more sources are coming forward. One I trust says Bebo is being pitched at $200 million. Update 2: Sources inside AOL are denying that it is exploring a sale. Bebo also denies a sale. Update 3: We have been in contact with corp communications at AOL, they say on the record: "There is no truth to this rumor." Four of our sources, including former and current Bebo insiders and a well-placed VC, say otherwise. Last December Gigam published "Is Time Warner Having Second Thoughts About Bebo?". I'm not saying Bebo is formally on the block, but I am saying that a sale is something under consideration].
My sources paint a picture of a startup which cleverly went about wooing advertising agencies, their clients, and – in the end – a media company that was prepared to jump on the social networking bandwagon during late 2007. There is absolutely no suggestion that anyone was dishonest or misrepresented the situation. But a year on it’s clear that AOL itself projected more growth onto Bebo that the network could deliver. → Read More
You may recall the three Lumix point and shoots that Panasonic announced on the 16th and thought that’d be the end of that. Well, those were just a warm up and today Panasonic revealed the rest of their 2009 lineup.
A handful of these cameras are wide-angle and record HD video in a new format called AVCHD Lite. Hit the jump for details on this new format. → Read More
If you want to track the most popular fan pages on Facebook, AllFacebook pushed out a new Facebook Pages Tracker last night that keeps stats on 611,213 fan pages on the social network. Only about 57,000 of those pages have more than 1,000 fans.
The tracker also shows the fastest-growing fan pages. A fan page dedicated to masturbation grew 11,900 percent in the last week and is the No. 8 fastest-growing page. Now we know why social networks are overtaking porn sites in popularity. (I didn’t link to it here, but that fan page on Facebook is NSFW). The top five fan pages are: → Read More
Netbook or not, Sony is going to sell a bunch of the VAIO P little lappies and it seems at least some early orders are being shipped. Sony is probably starting with the pre-orders and working their way from there. Originally, the P was suppose to ship sometime in February, but the FedEx man should probably drop a few of off sometime before the end of this month. Anyone order one? → Read More
Japan has a serious demographic problem. It’s already the world’s oldest society (22% of the population are 65 and older) and the birthrate stands at 1.34 (but a birthrate of 2.0 is needed to maintain Japan’s population).
So what does Nippon do? Answer 1: The country produces lots of robots to keep up productivity. Answer 2: The economy, in this case Canon, lets employees go home early (at 5.30 pm) to make more babies for the sake of the nation. → Read More
While the rest of the world is waiting for the breakthrough of e-paper as part of everyday life, Japan seems to be a step further. Tokyo-based Toppan Printing has developed electronic papers that can be used as flexible information displays in the case of major disasters such as earth quakes. → Read More
Mobile VoIP and IM service fring, one of the more popular mobile communication services around, is experimenting with porting a bunch of third-party apps to the fring client and will be announcing a number of those in the course of this year. Today, fring is launching a custom mobile-optimized Last.fm music radio add-on that brings a lot of the music recommendation service to the fring client but also integrates with the latter’s social and communication features.
Fring users (also referred to as fringsters) are now able to fire up streamed music radio channels, including their own Last.fm library, tag favourites, ban disliked tracks, view album artwork and basically take their Last.fm music account mobile. In addition to getting those features into the client, fringsters can also opt to view in real-time what their contacts are currently listening to, with the help of a friends list embedded into the Last.fm add-on. → Read More
With yesterday’s release of IE8 RC, I was reminded of an annoyance my partner had when I first installed Google Chrome because she was unable to use her Hotmail (short for the official name Windows Live Hotmail and not to be confused with Windows Live Mail) account properly using the new browser. I checked if the e-mail service – among the most popular webmail services in the world – was working better now that Chrome is a couple of months old, out of beta and – admittedly slowly – taking bits of market share on a daily basis.
Update: Google just got in touch with us to point out that they’ve just released an updated version of Google Chrome which integrates the work-around (see below) inside the browser so that non-techie users would be able to use both Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Hotmail without any problems “while the Hotmail team works on a proper fix”.
No such luck. Apparently, with Microsoft’s latest upgrade of the Windows Live Mail service, things got really broken, causing users to be unable to write, reply to or forward e-mail messages. Evidently, these are essential functionalities that shouldn’t take a company of that size to fix within a day or two. So why doesn’t it still work after weeks and weeks of complaints (see here also) by Google Chrome users who still make use of their old Hotmail accounts for sending and forwarding messages to their friends? → Read More
SkyGrid, a new aggregation startup that is preparing to launch a free version of its product, has an angry ex-employee on its hands named Sara Parker.
Parker, a “Process and Documentation Specialist” at the company from August 2008 to December 2008 according to her LinkedIn Profile, says via Twitter that “after discovering baaad things about management team, i gave notice.” The next day, she says, she was fired without severance.
Some of the Twitter messages she wrote are more of a rant than anything. But she does trash her boss, the VP Engineering, as a “notoriously poor communicator” and that his “challenges directly interfered with the quality of the product.” → Read More
Last August, I upgraded from a simple flip phone to a HTC Touch. Immediately I began looking for a way to avoid manually entering my Gmail contacts into the phone. After several hours of fruitless searching, I stumbled on NuevaSync–a free service that sync’d both my Gmail contacts and my Google Calendar. Thankfully, they also support Google Apps accounts. When I got an iPod Touch, I started three-way syncing my contacts and calendar across three platforms: Windows Mobile, iPhone, and the cloud. As a user, this free service is a dream. I only think about it when I need to change a setting–otherwise everything is seamlessly behind the scenes. And they keep improving. They just announced iPhone multiple calendar support, and expect to break 100,000 users sometime this week. NuevaSync maintains a low profile–they don’t charge, they don’t advertise, their website is spartan, and yet they’re hiring full-time staff. So I e-mailed David Boreham, their CEO, with a few questions: Why do people use the service? A common story is a husband and wife team who want to share a calendar. One of the pair will typically begin using the service first then ask us if their spouse can share a calendar. We have doctors using the service we well as lawyers, scientists, students and even a few venture capitalists. After fixing a number of user-reported timezone bugs we know that we have users in all parts of the world (including Easter Island). We don’t really track specific companies using the service but we know from support traffic that it’s common for several people in the same organization to use the service together, with shared calendars. How long have you been around, and what’s the roadmap for the future? Nuevasync began public service in September 2007. Originally the service was deployed as a vehicle for testing our sync protocol implementation. Google calendar was chosen as the first data source somewhat at random, based on the availability of an API and reasonable terms of service for its use. Over time, and particularly after the release of the iPhone 2.0 in July 2008 users selected the service as a way to sync Google contacts and calendar with their phones. Nuevasync adapted to the influx of new users, deploying more servers and moving our operations to a highly reliable data center in the South Bay. We just released support for multiple colored calendars → Read More
The various iterations of the PSP have seen success, perceived as only modest success due to the runaway sales of the DS. The PSP 3000 actually had some real changes in it, not unlike the DSi, but some think that a more radical reinvention of Sony’s underappreciated handheld is in the cards. → Read More
Just so you know it isn’t just the younger players dropping jobs like it’s going out of style, it looks like the blue chips are feeling it, too. IBM and TI filed their papers just recently and they have been found to be scraping the bottom as well. TI more than IBM, but still. Condolences to all. → Read More
Gosh, these lasers grow up so darn quick! It seems just yesterday that the Avenger’s predecessor, the Advanced Tactical Laser, was being tested on those cute little Hercules transports. And then all that fussing about the Free Electron Laser!
You just wanna hug ‘em! Am I right? → Read More
Mobile video service Kyte is trying hard these days to please its biggest (paying) customers: music labels and their artists, primarily. Performers such as 50 Cent and John Legend use Kyte to record behind-the-scenes moments on their cell phones and then share them over the web immediately with their fans. To help its customers manage their mobile video channels just as they would any other Web property, Kyte will introduce a new dashboard and management console on Tuesday at a conference in Las Vegas.
The Kyte Dashboard is a bit like Google Analytics for cell-phone video. It is filled with charts showing the number of views for each show, ad impressions, bandwidth usage, most watched shows, and the sites where the embeddable videos are watched the most.
Below are screenshots: → Read More
You may soon be able stop your packet sniffing, WEP cracking neighbors from stealing your precious internet with Wi-Fi blocking paint. That’s right. Nothing complicated, just paint. → Read More
I’m a huge shoot-em-up fan. I have, at this moment, at least 113 “shmups” installed on my computer (mostly from Shoot the Core and Shmups.com) but it’s rare to see such a high-profile project, must less a massively multiplayer online one. Valkyrie Sky is that rare and extremely pleasant exception, only the problem is it’s only for Koreans — like you have to have a Korean social security number to download it. → Read More
