Going for the “peace through superior firepower” theme, custom builder group Inventgeek built the ultimate solution to keeping those pesky kids off your lawn – the paintball turret. Featuring dual barrels, and available in a wired or wireless platform, this seems like the ultimate in paintball warfare. → Read More
When can we call plasma officially dead cause the flat screen tech doesn’t have much going for it anymore? Pioneer and VIZIO just announced they are getting out of the market and now LG is contemplating the same thing. → Read More
I bet the boys and girls over at Sony breathed a huge sigh a relief when that “Kaka-to-Manchester-City” rumor finally died last month. After all, he’s the star of its latest commercial, seen here, promoting the company’s Motionflow technology. Fast-paced sports benefit from all those hertz (and a nice helping of signal processing). → Read More
Ho-lee cow, that’s a sweet rebate. Amazon’s got the “lighter than air” Samsung X360 notebook for under a grand if you’re the type of person who owns stamps and can handle mailing things before certain deadlines. → Read More
A super-secret Digg toolbar has been spotted in the wild. We tracked down a beta tester who gave us the skinny on its features. The toolbar lets you Digg or Bury the page you are on, and shows how many Diggs it has already received. There are also links to show related pages, as well as more pages from the same source voted highly by the Digg community or marked as up and coming.
Then there is the “Random” button which works like StumbleUpon. It takes you to a randomly-generated page based on your past input and overall Digg voting. By the prominence of this button, it appears that is a feature Digg will be trying to highlight. Users can also share the page via Facebook, Twitter, or email via icons at the top. A drawer slides down to expose additional functionality.
Now, here where it gets interesting. For each page, the toolbar creates a shortened URL similar to TinyURL or bit.ly that starts instead with http://digg.com/. . . followed by a six-character code such as “http://digg.com/d1gVha.” When you share a page via Twitter or Facebook, it is that shortened URL which is used. And in fact, for the beta testers, the toolbar can be wrapped around any page simply by sticking “http://digg.com/” in front of any URL, which then gets converted into a shortened version. → Read More
Alaska Airlines has announced that they’ve started testing Row 44’s satellite-based Wi-Fi service on a handful of Boeing 737-700s. The first trial flight will take place between Seattle and San Jose (leaves Seattle at 2:20 PT today and returns on Flight 329 from San Jose back to Seattle) and the service will be free for 60 days. After today that aircraft will shift routes, which includes anything going up and down the West Coast and Alaska. No exact date has been attached to the trial (but I would assume it’s today or sometime this week) and pricing hasn’t been set, but I’d imagine it’s close to what VA or AA is charging for Aircell’s Gogo service. Now watch the boring video after the jump. → Read More
Windows 7 just plain rocks, but the RC is getting some tweaks over the Beta 7000 release. According to the Engineering Windows 7 blog, a good amount of the changes will be done ‘under the hood’ but still, some updates will involve a visible difference. After perusing the list a bit, it seems most of the changes simplify the user experience and clean up the interface a bit more. Honestly though, the beta is amazing and I’m sure most users cannot wait to see what will change for the better. → Read More
Well, that didn’t last long. HP’s Upline, a backup service that offered unlimited storage for $59/year, is closing its doors. Since launching last April, Upline has faced issues with extended downtimes – a pretty major offense for a backup solution. But it’s likely the ultimate reason for the shutdown is that Upline was never really able to get much traction in a crowded space with very little in the way of differentiation. That said, there’s clearly money to be made in online storage, as evidenced by Hitachi’s recent acquisition of storage and backup solution Fabrik this week and EMC’s $76 million <a href="acquisition of Mozy in 2007.
Below is the letter sent to HP Upline users, who will have until March 31 to download their files. In a classy move, it looks like HP is going to refund any fees customers have paid for the service. → Read More
Bandai’s everlasting Tamagotchis, which recently got upgraded to color, face some serious competition from another Japanese toy maker. Takara Tomy has developed the Yuruppy, which is as least as cute but requires no care at all. → Read More
In an effort to beat this Kindle horse closer to pulp, I present an excellent essay by Ed Champion, a guy who knows publishing. He points out that the publishing industry is stuck in one or two models that just don’t work and things need to change. First, he brings up three interesting examples: Valve offering its hit Left 4 Dead for half-price over President’s Day Weekend and improving sales 3000%, sales of board games going up in recessions because humans enjoy durable entertainment (games, books, maybe DVDs) in a downturn, and Free Comic Book Day which accounts for the most comic book sales over the year. → Read More
Remember when people used to memorize phone numbers? How many of the phone numbers of the contacts in your cell phone do you know by heart? I know my wife’s and both my parents — that’s it. Assuming I’d want to get in the way-back machine and go to a simpler time, this Bluetooth-equipped rotary phone might do the trick quite nicely. → Read More
While there may still be a lot of confusion surrounding the future of AOL, that didn’t stop the folks in Northern Virginia from recently overhauling their popular AIM instant messaging app for iPhone (and iPod touch). Available in two tasty flavors, free (“AIM Free”) and paid (“AIM Paid”), AIM 2.0 for iPhone now provides SMS notifications, has location-aware services, and supports multiple accounts (among other updates). It appears as though all of the application updates have been included in both the free and paid versions, with the major (and obvious) difference being the inclusion of ads in the buddy list of the AIM Free app. → Read More
TomTom announced today that Microsoft is suing them for patent infringement, however they denied that they had violated any of Microsoft’s patent rights. Microsoft said that it it taking legal action against the GPS maker after the two failed to reach a licencing agreement after more then a year of negotiation. → Read More
Looks like Google is now preventing anyone with an unlocked G1 from downloading for-pay applications from the Android Market. Google says this is to prevent piracy (but only in the most abstract sense, in my [worthless] opinion), but some developers don’t like the idea. Welcome to the Situation Room, I’m Wolf Blitzer. → Read More
http://www.gametrailers.com/remote_wrap.php?mid=46035 We got a big fuzzy feeling when we first saw stills of the Oregon Trail port coming to the iPhone, so seeing it in smooth, buttery action is like being hugged by the physical embodiment of pure nostalgia and happiness. It looks like they’ve captured the original spirit of the game pretty well, building up the foundation rather than just tearing it all down and exploiting the name for all its worth. Everything we know and love makes an appearance. I want it now. If things are still on schedule from what we’d heard before, look for it to hit the app store sometime in the next week or so. → Read More
Playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl with the standard Wii Classic Controller is okay, but it kinda feels small in my manly hands – like I’m playing video games using a granola bar or a harmonica or something. I’m sure it’s just fine for younger generations but I might have to gravitate to the Classic Controller Pro when it comes out this summer. → Read More
We’re live blogging this morning’s Facebook conference call, during which Mark Zuckerberg is planning to “announce the new steps Facebook is taking to improve user understanding and ownership of the Facebook terms of service and, more generally, the policies of the Facebook service”. The call begins at 11 AM PST.
To coincide with today’s call, Facebook has also announced that it is Opening Up Its Terms Of Service To Input From Users. → Read More
After the uproar that ensued when Facebook tried to change its terms of service a couple weeks ago, along with its subsequent backpedaling and public assurances that users own their data, the company is trying a different tack. It is inviting users to comment and contribute on proposed changes to its terms of service.
Facebook has posted a proposed set of Facebook Principles (reprinted below) and proposed Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Members can discuss these proposals in two groups dedicated to each set of statements (<a here and a here, respectively). → Read More
Yahoo’s new CEO Carol Bartz is streamlining the company and picking which executives will remain on her team and which ones won’t. Chief Financial officer Blake Jorgensen will be departing, as will the head of Yahoo Mobile, Marco Boerries, among others. Getting a bump up are Ari Balogh, now CTO and head of all products, and Hilary Schneider on the advertising side, now head of North America. David Ko will be taking over mobile, reporting to Schneider interestingly enough rather than to Balogh. In her first blog post, Bartz writes:
So today I’m rolling out a new management structure that I believe will make Yahoo! a lot faster on its feet. For us working at Yahoo!, it means everything gets simpler. We’ll be able to make speedier decisions, the notorious silos are gone, and we have a renewed focus on the customer. For you using Yahoo! every day, it will better enable us to deliver products that make you say, “Wow.”
In addition to getting rid of unnecessary layers of management (and, oh boy, does Yahoo have plenty of that), Bartz also says that she is going to get the company to pay more attention to its customers and to burnishing its brand. To that effect, she is creating a “Customer Advocacy” group to speak for the customer inside Yahoo, and she promises to clarify “what the Yahoo! brand stands for. . . . Look for this company’s brand to kick ass again.” → Read More
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