Well, well, well. Yesterday I mentioned that Japanese telecom NTT DoCoMo had begun selling the BlackBerry Bold last week and today there are reports that they’ve pulled the device due to overheating. Approximately 4,000 Bolds have been sold with 30 reports of the keyboard area getting a little too hot while it’s being charged. RIM doesn’t think it’s a battery issue, but the root cause has not been identified and don’t worry, it’s only the Japanese variant that has the issue. Reuters → Read More
If this post on a local blog about Brooklyn has it right, the NY Times will be debuting a neighborhood blog project next week on Monday. Here’s the gist:
Look out, local bloggers, the Gray Lady is moving in on your turf. Starting next week, The New York Times will be rolling out a neighborhood blog initiative starting mid-day on Monday. Our home soil of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill will be one of the two pilot sites (the other site will cover Millburn, Maplewood and South Orange in New Jersey). According to an email that was forwarded to us, the subject matter will include “cultural events, bar and restaurant openings, real estate, arts, fashion, health, social concerns and anything else that goes on in the ‘SoHo of Brooklyn.’”
We’ve had OpenId to make the transport of your ID easier between Web sites. We’ve had initiatives on Data Portability to make it easier for you to move your data around between social networks and other apps. But what we haven’t had yet is a way to allow you to share your location between different mobile social platforms. That’s something that a new, largely European-inspired, initiative hopes to address. The alliance, called OSLO (Open Sharing of Location-based Objects) includes many of the players in mobile social networking and location-based social software. Twelve startups, all of whom serve their users with location-based services, have signed an agreement to enable their combined 30 million users to share location information and interact between networks. Currently most location-based systems operate in a similar fashion to instant messaging systems, and don’t interoperate. The question is, will Google’s Latitude and Yahoo!’s FireEagle come on board? → Read More
Did you know that you can assemble your own wiki pages from Wikipedia and print them out in book form? You can, for a while now, thanks to a partnership between Wikimedia Foundation and a German startup called PediaPress. Last week, the wiki-to-print feature was activated for six more languages besides German but as of yesterday the functionality is also being tested on the regular English Wikipedia (restricted to logged-on users only for now).
You can check it out here, but you might want to visit the help pages first.
The books can be created with a table of contents or category lists and can be downloaded as free PDF files but also ordered as a printed book from PediaPress. → Read More
It used to be that if a link was worth sharing, people would bookmark it for all to see on del.icio.us. Now, they just Twitter it (with a shortened URL). Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to separate out all the Tweets with links in them, and sort them by time or popularity? That is what MicroPlaza does in a nutshell.
MicroPlaza is still in a very limited private beta, but I have 100 invites for TechCrunch readers. Once you log in, you are presented with a stream of headlines, along with everyone who Twittered the link to that page. You can see a personal timelime made up only of links from people you are following on Twitter, or a public timeline to see what everyone is linking to. Each timeline has its own RSS feed. → Read More
A message on the German O’Reilly community blog indicates that the Web 2.0 Expo Europe, an annual event held in Berlin, Germany, has been suspended for this year in the face of the worst economic downturn in decades. (translated version here) The event, co-produced by O’Reilly Media and TechWeb, had been running for only two years.
Web 2.0 Expo Europe was widely known as an outstanding event for the European tech community with a host of excellent speakers, but like many companies O’Reilly and TechWeb are feeling the sting of the declining economy and are being forced to make difficult decisions. Obviously, this is bad news for European entrepreneurs and startups.
We’re still trying to get an official comment at this point. → Read More
Facebook launched Facebook Ads in November 2007 to give brands and businesses a way to create a presence on Facebook and interact with users. Starting next week, says a source with knowledge of the new product, those pages will be substantially redesigned.
Today there are countless pages (example) that highlight brands. These pages are free to set up, and the Facebook sales team then encourages those brands to buy Facebook ads that point back to the pages. The brands get users who become fans of the page and maybe leave a wall comment. Facebook gets ad dollars, and users never leave the Facebook site.
Those pages include standard Facebook features like a Wall for user comments, a News Feed showing changes and updates to the page, and places for photos and videos to be uploaded. Many advertisers also spend a great deal of money customize the page with applications and widgets showing off various products as well.
Look for a much more streamlined look to Facebook Pages next week though, with a multitab interface very similar to what Facebook launched to users in 2008. The default view will show the Wall (which may include negative comments unless they are routinely deleted). All the custom apps will be pushed to a second Boxes tab. The Pages will also likely mirror the look of normal user profiles, with an image in the top left corner, etc. → Read More
Pwn2Own, a sort of Gray Hat extravaganza, is going to be cracking browsers and phones for the third year in a row this March. It’ll go from the 18th to the 20th and thousands of dollars in prizes. Many will enter, few will pwn. → Read More
We fawned all over it when it was revealed, corrupted it with our pawing hands at CES, and marvelled at its recently-revealed big brothers. And now the X320 and X340 have specs and release dates.
More hinkfo after the bizump. → Read More
Although I don’t get the feeling that Ian Fleming would have been a big e-book fan (he was a paperback kind of guy), that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be awesome to have a 007-themed Sony Reader. Unfortunately the Reader itself is standard issue — but the cover for it is embossed leather, and the Reader comes with two free Bond books. → Read More
As the economy worsens and our wallets slim, an AirScape whole house fan sounds like a simple way to go green and save some money. While traditional whole house fans are noisy and power-hungry, the AirScape fans are ultra-quiet and energy-efficient. Payback on the AirScape is much faster than solar. Also, reducing electricity use means reducing CO2 emissions, so you’re reducing your carbon footprint while saving costs. → Read More
From blogs.adobe.com
Adobe AIR Marketplace is a central resource that allows developers to make their applications available to millions of potential users and makes it easy for consumers to find them.
Don’t pretend this hasn’t been on your minds, parents. You bought the kids Fallout 3, Gears of War 2, and the like, but are you making sure they’re getting the proper lessons they need from these games? The Onion presents a few valuable viewpoints on this subject. → Read More
You remember these guys, right?! Of course you do. I wrote about their TwistTogether lamp back in ’07. Anyway, now they have a TwistTogether shelving system that consists of two lamps and three shelves. It comes in candy or chocolate and retails for $110. This would make a really cool gift. Want one so bad now. → Read More
Sonim’s XP1 is supposed to be virtually indestructable, and although it’s put up with quite a lot of hammer blows, Sonim felt they could confidently state that the thing could take a 22-caliber bullet.
Well! What did they think was going to happen when they make a claim like that? → Read More
Yes, that’s Ghostface rapping in this, the first official trailer of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. Like all good trailers, there’s minimal actual gameplay shown, but worry not! Rockstar has also launched the game’s official site today, and there’s more footage of actual, true-to-life gameplay for your to view. → Read More
JPG Magazine, the innovative photography magazine that was composed of user-submitted photographs and shut down last month, has been revived. The magazine’s assets have been acquired by a group of investors who will also continue to employ some of the magazine’s staff, we’ve confirmed with a source with knowledge of the deal.
JPG launched in late 2006 with the novel idea of cutting back on publishing costs by accepting user-submitted photos and relying partially on the community to edit the magazine. But despite reaching near-profitability, the periodical announced that it was shutting down on January 2nd when its parent company 8020 Media ran out of money. Within a few days it became clear that JPG might still have life, as a number of potential buyers including Smugmug entered talks, but until now the future of the magazine was in limbo. → Read More
The frequent criticisms of the Wii are, unfortunately, very apt today. The accusations of fluff games and kids games find their targets easily here, yet Nintendo seems optimistic as ever.
With the sole exception of Punch-Out (itself the subject of other criticisms – franchise milking), the highlights of the 2009 lineup are looking mighty unexciting.
Let’s see here… Personal Trainer: Walking. O be still my heart! → Read More
Tonight Ning will introduce new chat functionality, giving Ning network administrators the oft-requested ability to integrate a rich chat environment similar to the one launched on Facebook last April. Ning’s new chat system is Flash-based, presenting users with a persistent chat bar along the bottom of their screens as they browse through a Ning network. Users have the option of chatting through an interface at the bottom of their screen, or can ‘pop-out’ their chats into their own windows. While the interface will remain consistent across each network, users won’t be able to chat with members outside of the Ning network they’re currently browsing.
Ning originally introduced a more basic chat feature last summer, but that version uses either dedicated chat pages or sidebar iFrames, which means they aren’t always visible as users navigate through a network. But even the basic version has proven to be very successful – Ning’s chat traffic has skyrocketed, as seen in the Compete graph below pitting Ning’s IM domain against Meebo’s homepage. To be fair, the graph probably doesn’t take into account Meebo’s traffic that occurs offsite (like Meebo’s Community Chat product or its chat widgets), but it’s clear that Ning Chat is rapidly gaining traction. → Read More
