I found a new phone for my Mom. It’s the Nokia 7510, a basic flip phone with just enough features to be dangerous yet it’s basic enough for even my sainted mother to use to dial us on the daily. The 7510 is a phone for the ladies, plain and simple. That’s not to disparage the ladies – it’s just that I haven’t seen a simple, stylish phone that’s not too expensive yet still packs lots of features into a slim package. It’s clad in brushed steel and chrome and has removable front and back faceplates – it comes with brown, blue, and red in the box. I was particularly enamored of the front monochrome LCD that shows the current time along with pertinent notifications. → Read More
After getting everyone worked up at CES over its X320 netbook, MSI has let slip two additional models in the X-Slim series; both actual notebooks with Centrino 2 processors, too. The 15.6-inch X600 and the 13.4-inch X340 are expected to be formally announced at CeBIT in a little over a week and MSI has already revealed that the X340 will cost under $1,000. → Read More
Beejive has announced a $5 discount off its popular BeejiveIM for BlackBerry app (regularly $19.95) in an effort to thank its “loyal BlackBerry community.” The sale starts tonight at midnight and lasts until midnight (PST) on Sunday, March 1. → Read More
Now that the race to get electric cars on the road is over, it’s time for the two-wheel variety to get in the mix. KTM recently announced that the EV Enduro, a race ready dual sport that was first announced last October, would be rolling off the production line sometime next year. A protoype of the EV Enduro has been in testing since 2008. → Read More
Funny how recessions concentrate the mind. In just over a year UK startup Skimbit has made the full journey from Web 2.0 era “decision-making tool” with a vague business model about affiliate advertising, to re-engineer as an affiliate aggregator for publishers. Re-launching as Skimlinks, the site now aggregates 11 affiliate networks for clients like Future Publishing and The Daily Mail newspaper. The move means it has now attracted first round investment led by Sussex Place Ventures with participation from UK government body NESTA, The Accelerator Group, and Angels Duncan Jennings (eConversions) and Alex Hoye (Latitude Group). The amount was undisclosed but is understood to be in the vicinity of £700,000. Skimlinks works by turning normal product links into affiliate links on-the-fly. A line of code populates the entire site including the archives. It then provides access to affiliate programs of over 7,000 international merchants (including the third of merchants that do not support deeplinking) across 16 affiliate networks. In these tough times affiliate marketing can be attractive to publishers but is usually an administrative nightmare and cedes too much control over editorial content. With Skimlinks a publisher can set which links should be affiliate ones or not. The service is currently free to use, and Skimlinks takes a small cut of the commissions earned by the website publisher. Competitors like the older Dianomi and Chicago-based Science Revenue appear to have more clients, but given they are North America focused, Skimlinks has an opportunity to break out more in the UK and Europe. Alicia Navarro, founder and CEO, reckons that “consumers no longer rely on advertising to make their purchasing decisions, instead being driven by reviews and recommendations from both editorial and user-generated content” – hence why publishers need to create the kind of content that is useful. Who knew? → Read More
Everyone’s favorite hacky-sack-with-a-screen, Chumby, will soon make the leap from your nightstand or desk to your TV or Blu-ray player. Future internet-connected TVs and Blu-ray players containing Broadcom chips from companies such as Samsung and Sharp will feature Chumby’s web-based widgets – there are currently over 1,000 – ranging from music and video streaming to news and weather to photos and social networking platforms. → Read More
I don’t care if the pins that hold the Danglet lanyard/wriststrap thing into the iPhone are made of friggin’ Adamantium – if you swing your GLASS SCREENED device worth hundreds of dollars around like the chumps in this video do, it’s going to get broken. And you probably deserve it, too. → Read More
Verizon Wireless launched its creatively named CDM8975 Push to Talk handset today. This new business-meets-multimedia walkie-talkie mobile phone was developed by Personal Communications Devices and comes dressed to impress, er, ready for the job site as it’s wrapped in an “industrial clamshell.” The CDM8975 will be available beginning March 9th, online and in good ol’ fashion meatspace, for $99.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate and a new two-year customer agreement. Can’t you just feel the excitement building?! Specs after the jump… → Read More
It’s not too common nowadays for two computers sitting side-by-side to NOT be able to both access the internet, but on the off chance that such an occasion may arise, Brando’s got a (theoretically) no-fuss remedy in the form of a little USB dongle. → Read More
Panasonic has announced a new Toughbook today [JP], a special version of its W8 notebook, which is also on the sale in the US. The new Japanese premium edition has no release date for overseas markets yet, however. → Read More
Image-licensing network GumGum is growing by leaps and bounds. Measured as an advertising network, it is now a Quantcast Top 100 site, reaching 13.7 million people in the U.S. and 23.5 million worldwide. More than 1,000 Web publishers are licensing images through GumGum, which allows them to pay based on how many people see the image or use them for free with embedded advertising.
Today, GumGum is adding blog network B5Media and gossip site DailyFill to its customer list. They join Glam Media, MTV, and Gawker. Sites that rely on celebrity pics particularly like GumGum’s model. → Read More
Who says that two isn’t a party? This Apple iPhone and Bluetooth keyboard look like they are having a rock’n good time. The two hooked up after an enterprising chap circumvented Apple’s approval and did it anyway. The hack isn’t mainstream or available to the public just yet, but judging by the interaction shown in the video, it must be coming soon. *fingers crossed* → Read More
I’m not one to disparage the creative output of others, but this guy needs a bigger keyboard. This cover of “Imagine” by John Lennon is played on an iPhone keyboard app and needs a little more throttle – maybe some sneers? A backup band of ocarina players? John Lennon was pretty angry when he wrote this song and this guy turns it into a decision whether to order waffles or eggs over easy. → Read More
Late last week, Microsoft Research shared a couple of things about Social Desktop, a prototype of which they are debuting at TechFest 2009 in a couple of days (along with dozens of other things). From the looks of it, this will be a much talked about product even if it stays in proof-of-concept phase for now.
And if they decide to open it up even just a little, this could be a major breakthrough in tearing down the virtual wall between the desktop and the web, a trend we’ve been noticing for years.
The service would essentially be capable of providing you with a secure unique ID for all the files and folders on your desktop, enabling users to share, comment on, tag and search files like photos and videos via a dedicated web page powered by .NET. → Read More
The fate of Sony’s portable handheld is wavering at the moment with poor sales and lackluster titles, but there’s still hope for a revamped design this year that might pull it out of the dark. Here we have two fresh rumors with one having a seed of truth while the other is ‘out there’. → Read More
Unfortunately for Samsung, we’ve all known about the TL320 for the last week thanks to Amazon, but the HZ15W is brand spankin’ new. → Read More
Huawei’s Android phone broke cover last week and while we weren’t able to get all touchy-feely with it yet, we might be seeing the phone soon. Reportable, the phone set to come from T-Mobile and carry the same nameplate as the brand. Details are still developing but it seems that the touchscreen ‘UPhone’ (their words, not ours) will start shipping sometime in the late summer of 2009. → Read More
In the first of several major product changes that will sweep through AOL in the coming months, the company is adding more lifestreaming capabilities to its Bebo social network today, including activity stream updates from rival social networks Facebook and MySpace. It is also introducing a visual timeline called a “Lifestory” that puts uploaded photos, events, and (soon) videos into a scrollable, chronological series of postage stamp icons at the top of members’ profile pages. Eventually, people will be able to subscribe to other Lifestories, including those from brands and bands, and embed them in their own profile pages or elsewhere. The timeline will also become the centerpiece of a Bebo iPhone app coming out soon.
The new features should all help to reinvigorate a site that has been in the doldrums lately. But Bebo’s biggest boost will come later this week when AOL migrates all of its AIM Profiles members over to Bebo on Wednesday and Thursday. This single move will more than double Bebo’s presence in the U.S., where AIM Profiles is even bigger than Bebo. According to comScore, Bebo’s unique U.S. visitors have been in decline the past few months to 5 million in January, whereas AIM Profiles has seen an upswing to 8.5 million.
At the center of AOL’s new product strategy is its “Lifestream Platform.” Think of it as FriendFeed for the masses, with personal AIM updates mixed in. → Read More
Japanese TV isn’t short of strange TV spots, but this one for Resident Evil 5‘s XBOX 360 Deluxe Edition is creeping me out. It stars Chiaki Kuriyama, the crazy schoolgirl Go Go Yubari from Kill Bill (she is also one of the villains in Takeshi Kitano’s splatter action film Battle Royale). → Read More
Classifieds aggregation service provider Oodle is on a roll and definitely one of the startups worth following closely this year. After signing up two social networking juggernauts – both MySpace and Facebook – the company is now apparently also behind the just launched AOL Classifieds platform, per blog post by Greg Sterling.
The news comes right after a significant financing round announced earlier this month, when 3 VC firms invested $5.6 million in the company, bringing the total in funding raised to a healthy $21.6 million. Meanwhile, its traffic continues to surge (see Crunchbase profile for some upward-pointing visitor number graphs). → Read More
