What a time to be alive in the UK! Manchester United come home from Meeelan with a 0-0 draw, Arsenal, um, win somehow, and there may soon be unmanned drones flying o’er the countryside! Truly the epitome of civilization! → Read More
What could be yummier than a mashup using the Google Maps API to crowdsource and pinpoint the best pizza places in America? Thanks to PizzaShare, you’ll hopefully never have to wonder where to get them slices because you can just enter the city or zip code and go for the one that has the biggest circle. It’s as easy as pie (you knew that was coming, right?).
Seriously though, there are plenty of services on the web and on mobile devices that you could use to find a decent pizza place if you’re ever somewhere where neither you or anyone you know can tell you which one’s “the best” (Yelp leaps to mind). Also, the downside of crowdsourcing is that you have to at least try to prevent gaming; PizzaShare lets you vote (share) on a pizza place as much as you wish. → Read More
Let’s be honest with each other, readers. The PS3 is expensive. Sure, it’s a Blu-ray player and there’s free online services, but it’s still expensive. It desperately needs a price drop to maintain its position in the market. But Euro Sony boss David Reeves said last month that we shouldn’t expect a price drop anytime soon. That didn’t stop Janco Partners analyst Mike Hickey from proclaiming that a $100 price drop is coming. → Read More
A UK man named Mark Taylor had his Gateway laptop fried by an actual earthworm, which was believed to have crawled inside the machine’s air vent to escape the man’s cats. Taylor received an error message that his processor’s fan wasn’t working and, upon inspection by an IT professional, it was found that the five-inch worm had been “cooked” after wrapping itself around the CPU fan, which in turn broke the fan, causing the computer to overheat. → Read More
UK start-up Imagini has secured a significant $13.5 million in a second round of funding. The additional investment comes from Horizons Ventures, NorthZone Ventures and Atomico. The first round of $5m and came from NorthZone, Atomico, TAG, Brent Hoberman (co-founder of LastMinute.com) and Bill Draper. Imagini has an interesting technology called VisualDNA which effectively works out people’s personality types by presenting them with picture choices – instead of asking users to log in and type in their profile. The Flash-based quiz is not unlike a game, and can be quite addictive once you get going. The result is that Imagini says online retailers get a 37% uplift from customers after they get profiled. So whether you picked the Grand Torino over the Lamborghini really does say something about you. You can see the test for yourself via the quiz in Imagini’s consumer-facing site called Youniverse, a sort of personality test-driven social network which we reviewed last year, which has a million uniques a month. The quiz also makes it easy to distribute through online ad and affiliate networks, and a plug-In that will allow any website publisher to create their own free online quiz. So far clients include MSN, Hotels.com, Pepsi, Lastminute.com, Nectar, Vodafone and the British Army. Some 15 million people have taken the quiz since the company was founded in 2006 and the something like 70% of contributors to the Visual DNA ‘community’ are from the US. Imaginia was founded by CEO Alex Willcock. Today it also appoints Dermot Halpin, former president of Expedia Europe, as non-executive Chairman and Board Director. CrunchBase Information Imagini Horizon Ventures Northzone Ventures Atomico Investments Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Disclaimer: The following information is based on “popularity,” as in not cold hard sales stats since that info is not made available by either mobile carriers or manufacturers (and therefore, the rankings below are subjective). The ranking information (below) is provided by AvianResearch L.L.C. and is culled from its Monthly Retail Store Survey where it surveys 100 service reps and store mgrs from across the four major U.S. wireless carriers (AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and T-Mobile) – though we’re not sure how asking 100 retail employees about their favorite phones is really indicative of anything. According to AvianResearch, these four carriers represent 85% of all U.S. mobile subscribers. → Read More
Sony Japan today announced the NW-S738FK and the NW-S736FK, two new portable media players that are part of the Sony Walkman series. Both devices feature a 2-inch TFT display and come with mini speakers and noise-canceling earphones. There is no word yet on a release outside Japan. → Read More
Infingement. That’s what Blount called Amazon’s text-to-speech feature.
Roy Blount, Jr., president of the Authors Guild, wrote an op-ed in the NYT today about the Kindle 2′s text-to-speech feature. Heavens to Betsy – we’re still talking about this?
I’m a writer. I’m writing a book. I want lots of sales and money. But I understand that technology is moving far faster than Blount and his buddies care to accept. The text-to-speech function on the Kindle 2 is just one of the features that will be included in an ebook reader from now until the end of time – it will never make sense not to embed one in the future. It doesn’t infringe on audiobook sales unless you’re crazy and dedicated enough to record the Kindle reading an entire book and then copy that MP3 file onto an iPod. At that point you can theoretically say you’re creating a homebrew audio book. → Read More
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confirmed on a conference call yesterday that Window Mobile 7 indeed won’t be here until next year. Although Ballmer didn’t give an exact date, it’s thought that the OS will be sent to manufacturers in November of this year and will show up in consumer devices by April of next year as previously reported. → Read More
What good is that Optimus keyboard without World of Warcraft? None good, I say, which is why it brings me great joy to see this homebrew WoW layout. It was created by one of the blokes at an Optimus Keyboard message board—message boards are the new salons—and is primarily for Warlocks. → Read More
It’s been a long time since we saw the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic sneak into 10 seconds of The Dark Knight. At long last, Morgan Freeman isn’t the only North American who can get one. As expected, the North American model (with the proper 3G bands, of course) of Nokia’s first touchscreen has hit US soil. While it’ll likely trickle out to other retailers in the coming weeks, it’s available immediately at the Nokia flagship stores in New York City and Chicago. It’ll set you back 399 bucks before Uncle Sam throws in his fees. [via Phonescoop] → Read More
First we had Ning, which lets you build your own niche social network. Now we have Fliggo, which lets you build your own YouTube. Fliggo is the latest startup to come out of Y Combinator. It has been in private beta for a while, but is now open to the public.
Fliggo lets you create your own video-sharing site. It hosts and streams the videos, and provides “grandma-friendly” management tools to customize the site and monitor usage. Fliggo sItes can be private or public, and are geared towards groups, companies, or video bloggers who want more control over who can see and comment on their videos, and the ads placed against them. Fliggo takes the expense and custom-work out of building a video-hosting site. → Read More
Having used both Kindles 1 and 2, I thought it would helpful to list where the new Kindle excels and where it falters. The dead tree book will never die – I think it will even have more longevity and popularity than the boutique appreciation of vinyl records – but our generation will be the last to use “books” as our primary reading systems. Expect ebooks to hit colleges in perhaps five years and high schools and grade schools in about 7. That said, should you buy a Kindle now? Why and why not? → Read More
In case you missed Peter’s guest spot on Attack of the Show last night, we have it for you after the break so you can peep an Asian in flannel. → Read More
A few days ago, we found out that AT&T had decided to pull all of their Sidekicktastic Quickfire units from the shelves, citing a failure to meet “performance expectations” as the sole (and rather ambiguous) reason. While we’d gone ahead and assumed they’d come to the shocking revelation that the Quickfire was painted with pure lead or the radiation levels were causing people to grow extra limbs, the real reason isn’t quite as exciting: people couldn’t figure out how to plug in the charger properly, and jamming it in the wrong way caused the units to overheat. → Read More
There has been mumblings that Nikon was going to introduce a new, entry level DSLR to replace the aging D40/D60 lineup and that DSLR might just might launch next week at PMA. Besides the MP count, details really aren’t flowing but we’re hoping Nikon has a nice DSLR in the works. → Read More
At long last, one of the many 8-megapixel cameras to be announced in the past few months has made its way to a US carrier. But megapixel count isn’t all that matters here by a long shot – does the $249 Memoir carry itself well enough across the board to come at such a price? And, as I’d imagine most people reading this review are wondering: can it replace my traditional point-and-shoot camera? No, it probably can’t. But more on that later. → Read More
This morning, Mountain View-based startup Appcelerator is taking the wraps off its second Preview Release for Titanium, an open-source developer platform meant to compete with Adobe AIR and the likes for building rich internet, mobile and desktop applications.
Titanium PR2 comes with a number of new features that are worth taking a look at, like an extensible Module API and built-in support for Linux and a wide range of programming languages like Python, Ruby and JavaScript in addition to C++. More technical details are outlined on the company blog Appcelerant.
The new release of the open developer platform, licensed under Apache Public License (version 2), can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OSX or Linux here. The release also includes a nifty tool dubbed Titanium Developer which groups a number of social media and communication services like Twitter, FriendFeed and an IRC chat module which is supposed to make it easier for the open-source developer community to connect and collaborate when using Titanium for building apps. Check out this screencast to see how it works. → Read More
